Tempest Prognosticator
by dblauvelt
Summary: The Great Exhibition, 1851... but it's not quite what Barabara remembers teaching in history class. Set after the Reign of Terror.
1. Slingshot

GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF, GETITOFFGETITOFF!!!!

Susan was screaming, twitching, kicking, shuddering and running, revolted at the pinching, barbed touch of the hundreds of tiny metal legs as the creature crawled up the small of her back and across her stomach, its slithering silver hide crackling as it slid across her body. The base around her was collapsing around her in a searing blaze of molten metal and screaming girders, the roaring explosions tenderly laced with a telltale deathly hiss as the precious air around her boiled off into the vacuum of space. She fell upon the release switch of the escape hatch with such force, for a moment she thought she'd driven her arm straight into the steel wall. There was a savage sigh as the capsule door tore itself open, and she fell inside, frantically trying to rip off the creature that had now crawled across her stomach, burrowing beneath her clothing and scuttling up between her breasts.

She didn't feel the pain as she landed on her back, didn't feel the wind get knocked out of her lungs, didn't hear her own screams dissolve into invisible, silent gasps because her own mind was deafened by her own mental cries driven by an impossible revulsion, crying to get this thing off, get this horrible, wretched thing off, get it off, GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF, GETITOFFGETITOFF!!!!

The creature used four segmented limbs to lift its slathering mouth up out of her shirt, placing each of its delicate, silver insectoid hind legs upon her chin in order to levering itself upward, while its cold, heavy tail twitched between the bare skin of her breasts. Susan grasped its head between her shuddering fists, her sweaty flesh slipping across the alien surface that gleamed with an oily sheen, her nails bending and snapping against its impenetrable carapace; the creatures multi faceted eyes reflected nothing but her terror, her own gaping eyes and bared teeth. She was only dimly aware that the door had cycled shut or the muffled jolt as the capsule ejected off the surface and into the calming depths of space.

It was just her now: just her and this hideous creature.

The bug placed four slim feelers at the corners of her mouth and slowly pulled back the soft, giving flesh of her lips.

Barabara. She cried out for Barbara, even though she knew the schoolteacher was back on the base, the base she'd left behind, the base that was busy vomiting its contents of fuel, fire, water, air and people into the back void of space.

The Doctor, they'd come so close. Everything had been going so well. They'd had plan, an actual Plan for once, and they were so close, everything was so close…

The creature's mouth opened further, revealing two mandibles that clicked and snapped, before setting their tips into the tiny gap between her teeth. Susan bit down another scream, fighting against the urge, desperate to keep her mouth shut, to try to keep her teeth together as the creature's impossible strength prised open her jaw.

From within the mouth of the giant silverfish, two wet, maggoty tendrils appeared, layered with dripping mucus, slowly scraping across her teeth and along her gagging tongue. Susan screwed her eyes up, and screamed for all she was worth, and in a last desperate urge to fight back, tried to slam her teeth shut, trying to cut off the horrible tendrils, but the pincers anticipated this, holding her jaw firm, as it forced itself into her choking mouth and down into her throat.

Susan tried to scream, tried to be ill, tried to cough, tried to breath, tried to kick, tried to punch, but the sharp pain that stabbed up into the back of her mouth and into her head filled her mind with white, and her body became suddenly still.

Top of Form


	2. Bit of Biscuit

Barbara peered over the edge of her teacup, surreptitiously observing the Doctor as she sipped at the dark and heady drink. If he noticed, he seemed not to mind, intent instead at daubing stray biscuit crumbs that had fallen upon the white linen table cloth and sucking absently at the sugary finger. She might have been mistaken, but he seemed to actually be enjoying himself. She winced at the sharp, tangy taste of the tea, and she paused to reconsider adding a spoonful of sugar, but unlike everything else here at the Great Exhibition, the sugar, a faint brownish, clumpy mass in its white china bowl, seemed so… unrefined.

All around them, it seemed, the crowds swirled and marvelled, the dresses the women wore possessing such vivid colours and such intricate designs so as to be impossible for such a past time period, while Victorian gentlemen, in their fine waistcoats and tall elegant hats did their best to affect an expression of boredom, while even in their eyes Barbara could detect amazement and wonder lurking, as everyone kept looking up, up into the glass sky that soared above them, encasing the trees, crowds, statues and even tea shops, in its steel and crystal grasp.

Barbara still couldn't believe that she was having tea in the Crystal Palace, out of all the places in the universe. It was massive, nearly two thousand feet long and nearly a thousand wide, three stories of red velvet filled with statues and marvels and people from all over the world. And, as Ian had pointed out, smells. He and Susan had soon wondered off to do look at some 'sciency things', as Susan had put it, while Barbara and the Doctor had been content to wander at a more sedate pace before Barbara's new shoes demanded a well-earned tea break. The Doctor had not seemed put out in the slightest, and indeed seemed grateful for the respite, even withdrawing a purse that Barbara had never seen before and even offered to pay for their meal!

Barbara had seen many wondrous things in the Universe, but she'd never seen that happen before.

When the Tardis landed in the narrow London alley earlier that morning, Barbara had felt a thrill race through her. It did not diminish when the Doctor told them that he'd gotten the date wrong, again, by a hundred or so years. Indeed, if anything, it made Barbara happier. After all, this was 19th century London… not the French Revolution, not an exploding volcano or some treacherous alien planet with seas of acid. This was what Barbara secretly longed for each time they landed. This was history, as safe as it could get, as long as you where careful where you went or what you ate. Manageable History, as Ian had mockingly referred to it. 

After some of their recent adventures, Barbara was quite content to play things a little safe.

When the Doctor had announced that it was 1851 and that it was Hyde Park, Barbara had actually giggled (and if Ian had heard that, she'd never live it down) and grabbed Susan, pulling her deep into the Tardis' wardrobe to pick out just the right frock.  
She'd tried on several before she'd got an honest answer out of the child, who quite honestly, was a terrible liar. It was a dress of crème with a rich, deep blue trim and an incredibly tight, tight waist. Barbara stood in front of the mirror and felt, for the first time in as long as she could remember that she was an attractive woman in her twenties... one who could barely breathe, but still. The shocked expression on Ian's face when she stepped back into the console room was worth every lost breath.

Now though, faced with thousands of wealthy women in dresses so stunning it made her eyes ache, Barbara felt her confidence slipping away. She was pretending, after all, affecting a class that she was separated from by a hundred years and by an entire lifetime of working. She narrowed her eyes as she scanned the crowds, feeling somehow distant, separate. Barbara realized she'd felt more at ease with the cave women she'd encountered all those years ago, which didn't say much about her fashion sense.

It was then that she caught the identical expression of distant contempt in the Doctor's own eyes as he surveyed the crowd. In a flash Barbara wondered for a horrified moment if perhaps, she was becoming just a little like him.

Barbara quickly lowered her cup and glanced desperately around the massive structure for some diversion, some topic of conversation, lest the Doctor press her for any awkward question. It was then that her gaze lit upon the tall, oblong structure that lay just outside the glass enclosure, its long form casting a sharp shadow in the late afternoon light. Its exact shape was obscured by the glass and metal and stalls, but it looked festooned with enough wheels and cogs to keep even the Doctor busy. If Ian and Susan had ended up anywhere in their tiresome search for a scientific exhibition, they'd end up there.

"The _Tempest Prognosticator_." Susan read the engraved sign nestled above the circular arrays of pint-sized jars arrayed around a large bell device. She pressed through the crowd, ignoring the irritated expressions of the fine ladies and posh gentlemen as she pushed them aside.

Ian trailed in her wake, offering polite smiles of apologies to the swirling, taffeta encrusted forms, which were not always ill received. Two young ladies, blonde with gently dusted faces made sure to match his gaze before partying shly, while another gaze from a fine suited, wide shouldered man with chestnut hair caught Ian completely off guard. He found himself blushing from the bold glances and focused his attention instead at the device before them. Placing a gentle hand upon Susan's shoulder, he examined the strange collection of glass objects that were intricately assembled in a circle, each narrow glass next topped by a delicate sliver of bone that were each attached to a beaded string that lead up to an ornamental bell that stood in the middle. 

"Whatever are those?" Susan was pointing at the grey, slimy blobs that wriggled and oozed at the bottom of the glass pints; the tone of disgust in her voice was identical to the one she'd used this morning when she'd seen the cravat he'd chosen. It had to be said that Susan made no secret of her emotions… unlike her grandfather.

"Slugs." Ian said, an old memory bubbled to the surface. "They're slugs!" He recognized the device from an old story he'd read at school and, despite himself, could hardly wait to see the expression on Susan's face once he'd explained. "It's for detecting storms. When one approaches, the slugs climb up the tubes, dislodging the piece of whale bone, which rings the bell. The more slugs that ring the bell, the greater the oncoming storm!"

Susan's eyes widened briefly in understanding, but failed to register the amount of horror that he'd expect of such an example of 'primitive retro-technology' as Susan had often referred to Ian's lectures at school. She just nodded, almost sadly, muttered something that sounded like 'poor tharils' before she pressed closer to the slugs, pushing aside another child that had stepped between her and the device, none too gently.

"If I recall," Ian continued some what deflated, "and I'm no Doctor, the government voted to adopt Admiral Fitzroy's Storm Glass instead." There was another name inscribed on the little plaque, muted by a swirl of brown, unpolished brass: the Luna Company.

"Storm glass?" Susan's eyebrows wriggled in a way that Ian found disconcerting. "Ah… presence of crystals in a liquid; solubility of a pressurised fluid affected by quantum tunnelling… more advanced science than slug torture, I suppose." Susan peered at the wriggling little creatures again, "but only just."

Ian sighed and found himself wondering, not for the first time that day, what Barbara was up to.

"My word."

It was one of the few things that Barbara had heard the Doctor say the whole day. It was not that he hadn't seemed to be enjoying himself, just that he seemed worn by the past few months and was quite content to remain in his own head throughout the day. Until now, that is.

Craning her neck upwards, Barbara could see why the Doctor was smiling so. A tall, slender tower, encased in gears and wheels and pulleys and pumps with shiny round windows and polished top casing that shined, stood outside the Great Exhibition, obviously wheeled into place since they'd entered earlier that morning. The sky was bright and ice blue, the sun's rays striking clear and sharp off the gilded lines and curved edges. It was nestled in among the other rides and round-a-bouts that swarmed with children, but this tower, this toy rocket, had more adults pressed about, kept at bay by a velvet rope and a red carpet.

It was, quite simply the largest toy rocket that Barbara had ever seen. There was no sign of Ian though, although the Doctor seemed to be glowing, a look that Barbara had only ever seen before on her own father's face when he'd played with his toy locomotive set.

He was certainly not the only one however. Many a top hat pressed through the crowd, and Barbara spotted more than a few faces that seemed overly familiar making their way upon the red carpet. She racked her mind to match the profiles to those she'd seen in old paintings, history books, or even, it struck her, cast on coins. One nose, in particular, struck her quite violently.

"Doctor," Barbara grabbed his arm, "Isn't that Lord Bainswick? You know," she paused not wanting the Doctor to think she only remembered the sordid bits of history and so therefore she refrained from mentioning the Chattendale Scandal. "The, um, the inventor? Before his imprisonment…" she finished lamely.

The Doctor frowned. "I don't recall that name." He stepped closer and Barbara, leaning on his arm, overbalanced, spilling the two of them onto the red carpet in a flutter of undignified expressions, mostly from the Doctor, most of the words ones Barbara had never heard before, but would never repeat. It was his cane that saved them from completely sprawling upon the grass, and instead they stumbled, recovering awkwardly, towards the tower entrance. A man, imposing and formal made to bar their way, but one glance from the Doctor stilled him in his tracks and, helped them instead up the slight set of stairs and into the heart of the amusement ride.

Apologizing to the Doctor profusely for her slip, Barbara gratefully took her seat and fastened the fabric buckle across her waist. The Doctor completely ignored her comments and, seemingly oblivious to the sweltering heat of the darkened interior, focused all of his attention on the toy dials and shiny levers that decorated the seats and walls. Barbara found the sunlight pouring in through her portal to be too glaring and pulled the tiny velvet drapes too, knotting the little rope and settling herself properly in the little compartment. It was only then that she noticed that she was seated directly opposite Lord Bainswick, renowned inventor, Casanova and, before his imprisonment and death, serial killer.

He smiled at her, his yellow teeth flashing in the dim, dust filled cabin.

History, it occurred to Barbara, could be terribly claustrophobic.

It was terribly impolite, but when faced with such a striking mass murderer, Barabara found herself completely fascinated by the length of his nose.

"How long is it?"

Lord Bainswick raised a manicured eyebrow.

"Hmmm?" The Doctor inquired, barely acknowledging her.

"The… the ride," Barbara recovered, ashamed at being so easily flustered. This early in his life, Bainswick was more likely to offer her a bouquet of flowers than the sharp edge of a knife. "How long is the ride?"

"I'm sure I've no idea…" The Doctor replied. He'd found a shiny dial and seemed entranced with it. Sometimes Barbara wondered why he ever left the Tardis.

"A mere moment, my dear." The voice was normal, not oily or memorable; not what she expected. "But it is by far the most exciting ride in the entire Exhibition!" Lord Bainswick smiled at her again, and this time, despite herself, Barbara felt herself relaxing.

But just at that moment, the ride rocketed and swayed, causing her to clasp the padded armrest in alarm.

Lord Bainswick smiled. "Not to worry, it only lasts a few more minutes. It's more for show than for anything else. I think you'll find that most people just come inside to be seen. Everyone wants to come on the ride, but no one wants to be… too excited."

Barbara was beginning to find his gentle smile addictive.

There was a gentle sigh as the brass pulleys and pumps puffed a last, long breath of steam. "There you are," the Doctor said easily, "over in a moment, just like the young man said." But Barbara wasn't fooled; she'd seen him clutching onto his armrest for dear life, just like she had. Barbara shook her head in exasperation, pulling the curtains back, casting outside for the sight of Ian's head or Susan's dark red dress. There was no sign of Ian however. Or Susan. Barbara tapped the Doctor's shoulder. It was surprising somehow, how calmly she was beginning to take these things.

"Doctor?"

"Yes Barbara? Oh- I'm so sorry, very remiss of me, what did you say your name was young man?"

The Doctor was still shaking Lord Bainswick's hand when Barbara finally hooked a finger under the old man's chin and dragged it to the porthole: the black sky and grey and pitted surface stared back into the Doctor's angry and glaring eyes.

"We're on the moon," she added needlessly.

The Doctor was silent. Barbara had to give him credit. He hid his surprise well.

Perhaps, like her, he was just a little bit tired of this kind of thing.


	3. Torsion

Ian was getting hungry.

He'd stated it twice but Susan didn't appear to be listening to him. All of her intention was focused on the strange meteorological bio-mechanical device.

He wasn't really hungry, at least not that hungry, but served as a good excuse as any to stop Susan from trying to talk to the slugs. He kept shifting around her anxiously, attempting to prevent too many people from staring at them. She'd stopped, mercifully, verbally communicating, but now as far as Ian was able to ascertain, she'd started trying to converse with her eyebrows. How on Earth Susan thought a slug would be able to reply via eyebrow signage was beyond him. It was with great relief that she finally gave up and turned away from the device- although that was nothing compared to the relief he'd secretly felt when the slugs had failed to speak to Susan.

There had been a lot of strange things that he'd seen so far in his travels with the socially-challenged Doctor and his granddaughter, but talking slugs was not something he was quite prepared to handle just yet. Brains with eyes in glass jars ruling half naked slaves? Fine. Talking slugs, no.

It was strange, the mental boundaries he'd developed in order to stay sane, but he wasn't about to stretch them if he didn't have to.

Ian had taken her hand and was steering Susan towards one of the main exits when he noticed that they were, in fact, being watched. It was the same man with the long brown hair again, a steady gaze amid the forthy sea of bobbing hats and frilly bonnets.

"What is it?" Susan had noticed his expression, but had already immersed herself in another machine swimming in cogs and metal: a power loom. The man at the display was ignoring Susan's peculiar stare and was fawning over some men wearing particularly expensive suits.

"Oh, it's probably nothing…" Ian tried to keep the man in sight, but the shifting crowds soon swallowed him up. It was only then that he realized that she was referring to the machine. "It's a loom… makes fabric. Used to have to make cloth by hand…" He distantly heard her mutter some fragmented equations, but his attention was drifting, continually watching behind them for any unsavoury activity. He wasn't quite sure what the strange man's intentions were, and if… well, there were some conversations he really didn't want to have with Susan if he didn't have to.

"They've gotten the torque completely wrong…" Turning back he found to his dismay that Susan's hands were fiddling with one of the complicated brass knobs, twisting it savagely, precisely. Suddenly the machine began pumping and weaving frantically, causing the newly woven fabric to billow out in amazing, angry gusts, much to the amazement of the showman. Ian took Susan's hand and started leading her firmly towards the exit before she could make any further improvements to the device. "Aren't you hungry?"

"No," Susan's contorted expression showed that she was giving the subject serious thought. "Not really. Ian, whatever is the matter?"

Ian offered a wavering smile. "I'm probably just paranoid, I thought someone was following us. Let's see if we can find Barbara and the Doctor, shall we?"

"As long as we do it outside." Susan started pulling him for a change. "I've gotten such a headache… fresh air can't come soon enough!"

An early morning rain had made the ground outside sodden and squelchy under their feet, and in many places the passage of so many people had churned much of the grass into muddy globs and gooey, grassy clumps. Together, they sought shelter from the crowds and incessant sun under the calming shade of a cluster of trees.

"We really should have arranged a meeting place…" Ian squinted into the light, tracing the park around the base of the Crystal Palace for the distinctive forms of the Doctor and Barbara. "I think I got carried away again… Susan, would you look at that!" He'd spied the nose of the rocket in the fairground with a laugh.

Susan followed him as he strode off towards it. "How primitive…"

"Strangely," Ian couldn't help but add over his shoulder: "it looks more space worthy than a certain police public call box…"

"Careful," Susan tried to scold him with a straight face and failed. "Grandfather will drop you into the heart of the nearest star if he hears you say things like that."

By now they could see the interlacing gears and cogs that adorned the massive sides of the rocket, as well as the steaming pistons and leathery pulleys that were strapped around its swollen belly. "There they are!" He spied the Doctor and Barbara steppig up into the ridiculous rocket. He and Susan tried to increase their pace to join the line, but the crowd had pulled back slightly and the last of the passengers were already stepping up onto the ride. Ian could almost sense Susan's disappointment as the staff tied the velvet rope off and waved back the crowd.

Ian blew out "Phewwww! That thing must have cost a fortune to build."

"We're too late."

"I'm sure we can get on the next round." Although staring at its base, Ian couldn't quite work out what the ride did… it looked almost as if the central portion could turn, or swivel? "Besides," he started sorting through some coins in this palm. "I've got enough cash for our tea, but I'm afraid the Doctor didn't leave me enough for much else."

Susan gave a quite unlady-like snort, but said nothing.

The three women beside Susan each stepped slightly further away.

Ian grinned despite himself and placed a companionable hand on Susan's arm. Together, they watched the staff, twelve men in what looked like outlandish sailor suits, gather round the rocket and begin to raise a massive velvet curtain around it, no mean feat as the rocket was nearly sixty feet high from tip to tail. There was a great deal of _poof_-ing and _schwoof_-ing as steam billowed from underneath the thick fabric. As the sounds of meshing gears ramped up into a high-pitched whine, he felt Susan sag against him.

Concerned, he held her close, studying her face as spasms of pain flashed across her pale features. She pressed her hands over her ears, her thin little body trembling under his grip. The sounds notched higher before reaching a crescendo that finished with a wild WHOOMP-ing.

Susan appeared to relax and Ian let out a shuddering breath that he hadn't known he'd been holding. "There you are," he said gently, "it's all over."

Susan's eyes popped open, the deep darkness of her pupils shocked Ian with their intensity. Inside, Susan appeared immense, uncontained, unbelievably powerful. He felt like a child somehow, errant, misunderstanding. "It's over," he repeated.

"What are you talking about?"

"The ride, Susan, the noise… it's stopped." He found himself taking a step backwards. She certainly no longer needed his support, but it was the stare that he was trying to distance himself from- it was nothing new, no strange possession. It merely reminded him of how alien she really was.

Susan blinked and her inner world was gone, hidden. "The gravitational inversion wasn't bothering me," she told him in annoyance. "It was those stupid slugs."

Before Ian could say anything else, Susan was headed back towards the Crystal Palace. "But," he called after her, "we should wait for the others!"

Susan paused, turning only to look at him in confusion. "They're gone Mr. Chesterton, didn't you see?" And then she slipped away into the mass of crystal and light.

Ian turned back to the velvet curtains, that had dropped soundlessly to the ground to reveal: a muddy patch of grass. The rocket- and Barbara and the Doctor- had vanished.

The 'ooo's and 'aaaah's gushing from the crowd all around did nothing to comfort him.


	4. The moon is made of pate?

"Doctor, this is absurd!"

"Of course it is," the Doctor agreed. "Calling this _foie gras entier _indeed… the nerve!" He poked at the silver trays of food arrayed upon the buffet table with a stern finger. "It's quite clearly clearly _leverpostei_… strange," the Doctor stroked his chin with a thoughtful finger, "the chef didn't look Norwegian… I wonder."

"Doctor, for goodness sake!" Barabara screamed the words into the quietest hiss she could manage before blasting them at his ear. "We're 'on the moon' and you're stuffing yourself!"

"Well of course," the Doctor chuckled. "What else would you like me to do, walk around with one of those ridiculous fish bowls on my head, hmmmm?" He waved an exasperated hand about him at the other gentleman who strode about the reception room, their faces slightly distorted by the two-foot wide glass orbs that encompassed their heads, the open rim settled loosely about their shoulders. The ladies had smaller, more decorative versions that most deigned to tuck under their arms while they sipped at the free glasses of wine. "Not meant for eating," the Doctor tucked into a pickle with gusto. "Certainly not."

After 'landing,' the guests had gracefully donned the attire before walking across the surface of the 'moon' and into the main hall. Most had left their moon gear in the cloak room, but many had kept theirs to maintain the 'party atmosphere'.

Barbara wasn't quite sure if these Victorians should be quite so knowledgeable in all things moony like atmospheres and such, but she'd downed that glass of wine quite quickly. To cover the shock, of course. She'd only had the second glass when she'd realize that the Doctor was doing absolutely nothing helpful.

As the Doctor settled back into his meal, a string quartet in the far corner struck up the first of their cords, hesitant at first, then tenderly melting into a gentle, soothing melody. Several couples around her began to move to the center of the room, their fine shoes scuffing and taping against the floor boards of the Moonbase. If she'd had a moment to gather her wits about her, she would have smacked away the hand that took her arm and spun her lightly in among the other dancers.

It was with no surprise that she found herself dancing with Lord Bainswick. "That's hardly good manners." She made her voice sound firm, so that he would not notice how uneasy she felt with the steps. Irritatingly, she found herself following his steps with ease, so good was he at leading. He merely smiled at her comment and tightened his glove-clad grip on her hand in a firm, comforting manner.

Barbara glared at him.

Whatever sins this man had committed in the past, or what heinous deeds he may do in the near future, few men can last long under the withering gaze of a furious schoolteacher.

Lord Bainswick was no such man.

"You must forgive my manners," he said at last. "Not only do I take you away from your friend, but I have yet to have introduced myself properly. Lord Bainswick, at your service."

Barbara considered her options: 1) ignore the man until the dance finished, 2) make a scene, a nice fat big one with swilled glasses, crashing plates and fainting virgins, or 3) be polite and, after all, it was only one song, it would be over soon. Option 3 also had the advantage of, perhaps, finding out just what was going on.

"Barbara Wright," she smiled, carefully steering them towards the glass and plate heavy mass of the buffet table. Just in case.

"You do not appear, if I may be so bold, to be at ease. And your accent, although familiar, sounds quite unusual." His eyes were a sapphire blue that sparked in the strange light of the 'stars' that dangled from the roof by thin, awkward and tangled strings.

Sparking sapphire blue eyes?? Barbara blinked. She focused on Bainswick's prodigious nose instead; scientific detachment helped quell other, stranger, emotions that shifted and lurked deep within her. His nose looked as if it had been broken and poorly mended once in the distant past, leaving a wide flattened prow before it hooked down in a way that would make a Roman Centurion weep at the beauty of it.

"I'm from London," Barabara hoped the song was almost over. At least it wasn't one of those dances where they kept switching partners. She didn't think she could manage the steps with out Bainswick's guiding hand. "Originally- but I've been travelling great deal of late."

"With your father?" Lord Bainswick nodded towards the Doctor.

"Uncle." Barbara meet his stare. Never blink when you lie, it's a dead give away. She smiled again, as pleasantly as possible. "So, this 'Moonbase'… Where is it exactly?"

"The moon of course. Where else could we be?"

Barbara stared over his shoulder and out the giant 'porthole' windows where the crumbled black and white cratered surface lay. It looked as if splotches of black and white paint had been smeared hastily across a large dark cloth. Silver paper stars, their edges torn and ragged, were pinned against a black backdrop. So dark was the sight beyond the glass that Barbara could more clearly see her own reflection than that of the eratz _Mare Australe_. "Where else indeed?" She forced out a laugh. It sounded more like she'd choked on her tongue, but Lord Bainswick didn't seem to mind. He was studying her very, very, intently.

"Still, that was quite a trick," she pressed on, for the song was almost over. "One moment we're in Hyde Park, and the next we're…" she trailed off, hoping he'd volunteer the information.

"The Luna Company are quite simply one of the most daring group of people that I have encountered. They don't like to set limits, of any kind." It was the same answer he'd given to the Doctor when they first arrived in the rocket ship.

"So, do you work for the Luna Company?" But Barbara felt the syllables fall uselessly to the floor as the music faded and couple around her parted, surrounding her with a babble of giggles and drivelling chatter, trodding carelessly upon her words as they moved off the dancefloor.

Lord Bainswick bowed, and taking her hand kissed it with a wink and parted silently.

Walking back over to the Doctor, Barbara couldn't help wondering if option 2 would have produced more satisfying results.

The Doctor, for his part, was immersed in a large portion of spinach quiche. Barbara took his arm gently, so as not to raise any eyebrows, and escorted him to the nearest porthole. "What," she asked firmly, "is going on?"

"Mmmm?" He nibbled the last of the quiche away and peered out through the thick glass. Through it they could make out the tall shape of the rocket ship, where the guests were now returning to in trickles of twos and threes. "Well, for one thing, it's certainly not the moon, if that's what you're asking."

"Really? That's amazing Doctor. However do you do it? Newton ought to fall at your feet in awe."

Sarcasm, however, was wasted on the old man. He'd produced a small toothpick and was determinedly working away at sliver of salmon that had become wedged near his left incisor. He leant against the window as he jabbed away, his shoulder just behind a curtain.

He spoke at last, very quietly around the toothpick. "I'm very well aware that this is not right, Barbara, do you think me senile already? However," he nudged his shoulder deeper into the recess behind the curtain, "there's nothing that we'll be able to discover with all these idiots milling about, now is there?"

Barbara glanced around her and saw that the hall was already two-thirds empty as the guests continued to return to the ship outside. Very, very innocently, she bent down behind the table as if to straighten her skirts and then slipped into the cover of the buffet table.

Through the narrow gap between the table cloth and the floor, Barbara watched as the number of feet gradually dwindled, until there were only those of the servants and the quartet. Soon, even those were gone and there was the sound of the main doors of the hall being slammed shut and the lights dimmed to that of the dull gray sky of the 'stars.'

Emerging from the table, she joined the Doctor who left the curtain to stare out through the portal: the rocket ship had vanished.

"Come along," the Doctor didn't have to say when he took her hand and they silently followed the wall towards a side door. It was unlocked, and though it opened with a ghastly creak, it led out onto the fabric moonscape. Looking around and not seeing a soul, they left the shelter of the hall. Barbara walked quickly to where the rocket had once been and found a large patch of mud and wet grass, but little else.

"I don't understand this." The Doctor was standing by the large, star pinned black curtain of space, one hand holding the fabric up, the other on his chin. "I don't understand this at all… but mark my words, I will get to the bottom of this."

Barbara came to stand by his side and stared behind the curtain, her jaw slack, her eyes disbelieving at the black void of space, at the vast panoply of stars, at the stunning, silent, soul-moving sight of the Earthscape above her.

The Doctor patted her arm distractedly. "I hate to say it, my dear, but we most definitely _are_ on the moon!"


	5. SLUG

"SUSAN!" Ian threw himself backwards, ramming his shoulder against the towering shelves. Gunfire spat through at him, its fiery breath hot against his neck as the spray of shot grazed his soft skin. Ian twisted his body instinctively, curling his legs and arms in to his chest to guard against another shot. Glass and brass artefacts smashed against his back and head as the contents of the shelves crashed down upon him and onto the flagstone floors, the sound of the thundering crashing tanks and metal slapping against his eardrums. Finally there was the sound Ian had been waiting for: the shelves, tumbling like dominoes, smashed out through the main window, tumbling out onto the street outside. He could already hear the cries and shouts of people coming into the building. Well-meaning hands pulled his battered, protesting body out of the wreckage.

Of Susan, or their attacker, there was no sign.

_**S.L.U.G. **_

The somewhat improbable sign above the doorway was twisted out of wrought iron, its black form glistening wetly in the early evening drizzle.

"Saving Little Underground Guests," Ian disbelievingly read off the little card in his hand once more. 

Susan looked up at the number on the door. "This is the right address." She put a hand against the glass, staring into the darkened interior. The oblong form of a counter lurked in the dim light, but there was also a definite figure that appeared bent over a ledger. "There's still someone inside."

Ian raised a hand to knock on the door, but paused. He wasn't quite sure they were doing the right thing. Upon returning to the booth that had once held the Tempest Prognosticator, they found that the staff had left, taking the strange devices with them. The only thing left behind were a series of brochures, like the one Ian had in his hand now, scattered across the empty floor. Susan had proudly declared it to be 'a Clue', but Ian remained more dubious. The lack of any sign of the Doctor or Barbara when the rocket ship had 'returned' an hour later had left them with little other choice than to track down this S.L.U.G. society. The staff of the Luna Company had denied all knowledge of the Doctor or Barbara and had forcibly removed them from the Exhibition Grounds. Ian had wanted to return and search the grounds after dark, but Susan had insisted that her Grandfather was 'no longer on this world'. "Shall I?" He asked, his knuckles poised to rap the lead glass.

Susan nodded. It was either this or remain in the Tardis twiddling their thumbs, waiting helplessly for their companions to return.

In response to Ian's knocking, the dark figure turned from the shadowy counter and swirled towards them in a flowing mass of cloaks and great coats. Susan leapt back in alarm as a rubbery nose with wild, spiked grey hair pressed against the glass. It was only as the light in the shop switched on that Susan saw that there was equally wild hair on top of the head as well.

The door was thrown open and they were greeted with a gust of warm, fetid air and a joyous chortle. "Come in, come in! You've gotten one of our flyers, I see. So kind. So pleased to see you've taken an interest in our little organization. Please, come in. Come, come!"

Ian and Susan exchanged bemused glances before stepping into the shop, each staring at the bizarre cluster of scientific apparatus, posters and shelves that towered above their heads. The shelves were loaded with books, tools and large glasses cases that enclosed a hundred different types of slugs.

"My dears, you look simply horrible!"

Ian considered the man's stained and sticky clothes that clung haphazardly to his portly form, before realizing that the man was fussing over a pot of tea, frantically pouring and arranging cakes for them. "It has been a bit of a rough day," Ian smiled, wondering, indeed, what they must look like to him. He and Susan moved over to the counter to accept the steaming mugs. "You're very kind."

"Not at all, not at all," puttered the man. "Any friend of SLUG's is a friend of mine!" He beamed brown and blackened teeth at them from around a jammy bit of bread. "My word, where are my manners? Julius Acavio, at your service."

"Charmed," Susan managed between hot gulps of tea and introduced them both. "I am sorry, but I'm a bit confused: S.L.U.G.? Saving Little Under…" She stumbled over the acronym. Ian, for his part, kept an eye out for the Tempest Prognosticator, but for all the clutter and ancient techno-junk that was strewn about the place, he couldn't see the strange device.

"Of course, this is the first you've heard of our little organization!" Julius pulled out a stack of the flyers from beneath the counter and dusted them off with an eager palm. "Saving Little Underground Guests: dedicated to preserving and helping our little friends who can't help themselves. I'm the founder!"

And, most likely, Ian didn't add, only member. The man seemed so enthusiastic, Ian found went to great pains to hide his own opinion of the society. Even so, he couldn't help but ask: "Slugs. You're saving slugs? From who… whom?" It was just a guess, but if slugs were as prolific in the 19th century as they were in the 20th century, such an organization seemed a bit, well, a bit redundant. Ian helped himself to another roll in case Julius decided to turn them out onto the streets once more.

"Those poor creatures," Julius nodded, as if Ian already knew the horrible truth. "No rest, no fresh air, no damp earth, hardly any food at all… did you know all of the wondrous things these little beauties do for us? Digesting leaves, fungus and carrion…" He gazed longingly at the large case that squatted above the ledger, its dark green water murky in the fluttering gaslight. Several dark forms clung to the edge of the tank, tiny gnawing mouths feeding on the algae that grew on its walls. "Such a simple form, yet so capable."

Susan was studying a poster on the wall that detailed the various stages of slug growth and health. "What on earth is 'apophallation'? Oh. Oh dear."

"Peculiar little creatures aren't they?" Julius smiled in sympathy before returning to Ian. "Forced into slavery for that horrible company. And what a species!"

"The Luna Company?" Ian remembered the name on the brass plaque that had sat beneath the Prognosticator. "Slug enslavement." He repeated. He wanted to make sure he was still following the conversation. It was worse than talking to the Doctor.

"Terrible people. All of them. Ghastly. Enslaving those poor dears for that silly 'Prognosticator'. Keeping them in those awful glasses, forcing them to knock off those bits of whale bone… honestly. There should be laws…" Julius rummaged about his desk, grabbing at handfuls of torn and rumpled papers. "I've taken my hand to start drafting a couple, but you know what Parliament's like these days…"

Ian took a long sip at his tea, considering. While friendly, Julius was, at best, insane. Then again, they had come to him so that Susan could 'talk' to the slugs themselves. Perhaps Julius was the sane one of them after all. It was then that Ian wondered just how far Julius might go to save his little friends. "Julius… this Prognosticator… you haven't been able to ste-… to take it yet, have you? In order to free the slugs, of course."

"What?" Julius' head twitched up, his nostril hairs trembling. "Of course not! They guard that thing day and night. It's all I can do to distribute the fliers without them hounding me. I've filed protests with the Exhibition board countess times, but no one listens to me..."

Ian took his hand, trying to focus the strange man. "Julius, where is it? Where do they take it at night?"

Julius stared back at him, eagerness evident in his watery, podgy eyes. "Jenton, a warehouse… not far. Always under guard of course, like I said." He thrust a grimy hand into a stack of papers that threatened to spill off the counter as he flicked and poked through them. "In here somewhere… wrote it down…"

Susan was at the edge of Ian's vision, wandering through the darkened room, moving from tank to tank. He could hear her muttering under her breath as she attempted to communicate with the inhabitants. Julius, however, either did not think it was odd or was too distracted attempting to locate the address of the Luna Company's warehouse.

"Ian!" 

He spun around to see the tall figure in the doorway, a pistol in each hand. It was the man he'd seen in the exhibition, the one that had stared at him, followed him. Before Ian could react, one of the pistols had fired, knocking Julius against the wall in a bloody spray that splattered against the tea cups and splashing warm blood and tea upon Ian's face. He found himself staggering, backwards, throwing himself against the tall shelves….

When it was all over, when they had stood all the shelves back up, they found nothing but the crushed remains of a hundred drying slugs and Julius' cold body, buried under a mountain of bloodied paper.


	6. Sil ver Tongued

It was incredibly unnerving.

Barbara crept down the corridor, seeking shelter in the Doctor's fleeting shadow, and tried not to think about her surroundings too much. Or, if possible, not at all. It was striking, that was certain. During these recent years Barbara had been in a great deal of corridors. This one, resplendent with polished brass archways and decorative portholes set into the curved walls, was studded with large, rounded bolts, and windows of thick glass that bent the earthlight into peculiar streaks and smears. For the life of her, Barbara couldn't work out how the Victorian moon base could possibly remain air tight; it was like being encased in a massive diving bell. Barbara kept peeking out through the port holes to see if there would be a man in a huge suit walking across the lunar surface, an air hose leading off into the black night, where an unseen assistant pumped frantically away. Under the flickering gas lamps, she saw that the Doctor had scurried ahead, and she lengthened her stride to keep up.

Ever since the rocket had left, the night had gotten stranger and stranger.

"It's dirt, Barbara, dirt!" When the rocket had first vanished, the Doctor had knelt down upon the faux lunar soil, his gaze on the contents of his trembling hand. "Would you believe?"

Barbara knelt with him, but stare as she might, all she saw was dirt. She remained silent, however. The Doctor was never able to contain his 'brilliant' revelations for long.

"I should have guessed… of course!" The Doctor continued, obviously savouring the moment. Barbara cast around her, waiting to see if their host would return, sincerely doubting that, whoever they were, that they'd be friendly. Moments passed, however, yet the Doctor revealed nothing further.

"Oh for goodness sake! Honestly, you're worse than one of my students, Doctor."

The Doctor beamed. "Earth, don't you see? This isn't lunar soil, it's from Earth, from Hyde Park, I'd wager!"

Barbara stared about them: above, she now new, hidden behind the curtain, was an intricate lattice work of glass and lead, a fragile bubble that kept her fluids inside her skin and the air within her lungs. On the ground around her, however, underneath all the painted craters and rocks, beneath the thick covering of the canvas there was a large patch of dark earth and churned grass. Right beneath where the rocket had stood only a few minutes ago. "But, why? What's the point?"

"I have a theory," the Doctor tapped the side of his nose the way her own grandfather had used to, at least after his first half dozen pints of lager. "I wouldn't be surprised if, under a bit of grass and dirt down in Hyde Park, there's a matching bit of terra luna… luna firma… erm… lunar soil…" His voice trailed off, the candy cotton wool of his thoughts teased away by concepts that Barbara dared not guess at.

That had been before they'd discovered the hatch that led from the deserted kitchens and into the moon base. Since, they'd seen several engine rooms shuddering and heaving from the thundering pistons and gears within; generating, or so Barbara hoped, the energy and oxygen that kept this place functioning.

The Doctor paused in a doorway ahead of her, ushering her in with a flutter of his hand, before darting like a sparrow into the dark archway.

Barbara followed more cautiously, and gasped.

It was a warehouse, with a ceiling so high, it was hidden in darkness. Yet despite the black cloak that smothered the summit of the room in shadow, the treasure within glittered with a thousand colours. There were telescopes, desks, armchairs, bicycles, thrones, portraits, dinner ware, ship masts, ornate infant cribs, spittoons… the list went on, infinitely variable, and all in this one room. Despite the haphazard arrangement and stacking, it was evident that they had been placed there with great care. Whereever Barbara looked, she could find neither a scratch nor a dent on any of the random polished and brushed surfaces.

A thought occurred to her.

"They didn't… they didn't manage to steal all this from your Tardis, did they?" It was the only explanation that Barbara could think of and she found herself peering into the darkened corners to see if she could spy the reassuring sight of the squat, blue box.

"What?" Spittle from the Doctor's sputter speckled the skin of her cheek. "What do you think I am, some sort of interstellar pack rat?!"

Barbara declined to comment, wiping off the wetness, her mind still too tired and dazed to take much more in of this strange world.

The Doctor plucked an ornate spatula out of the montage before tossing it aside in disgust. "Do you really think my tastes would be so… so… narrow?"

"Narrow?" Barbara stared at the insane mound that teetered above her. "What on Earth-"

"Sh!" The Doctor clamped a papery palm against her mouth and dragged her into the safety of the doorway.

Barabara wished she was surprised when she saw the figure stride down the corridor, wished she could have felt disappointed even. By now she had accepted that being with the Doctor meant that everywhere she went, and everyone she met, had been turned towards her by the hand of Fate. Or perhaps, by the hand of Tardis.

She glanced at the Doctor and, nodding together in accord, they followed the retreating figure of Lord Bainswick.

They followed him through the sinuous pathways until the Lord stepped into a massive amphitheatre, but this room was empty of random assortment of bric-a-brac they had witnessed before. She and the Doctor quickly hid themselves in the darkness of the massive airlock door. The interior was bare with the exception of the red carpet that led to a large oval platform upon which, Barbara spied, a light scattering of pink dirt that dripped down the fine polished brass base in streaky, dusty tears.

Beside her, she heard the Doctor softly cluck his tongue, just once, but enough to convey that everything was just as he suspected.

Lord Bainswick, his head bowed, knelt upon one knee before the steps that led up to the podium. Barbara caught snatches of syllables drifting from him across the Spartan room, but she could not discern if they were verse, comments or just unintelligible mutterings. The dais hummed, whether in accordance to his words or just by coincidence, and the air, as if it were above a hot skillet, seemed to vibrate and boil.

Barbara wasn't sure which she registered first: the Doctor grabbing her arm in alarm, or the five figures on the podium. The Doctor hissed something into her ear, but she couldn't understand what they were.

Upon the platform were four impossibly handsome men, scantily clad, their skin deeply tanned and burnished, as if lacquered, their muscles tight and straining as their bore their burden on a skiff between them that held… Barbara blinked, not sure what she was seeing: it was a three foot high, hissing human-slug- or maggot? The creature gargled and hissed as Lord Bainswick rose to greet it.

"A Thorus Betan," The Doctor repeated, pulling her further into the shelter of the door. "It's a Mentor…"


	7. A Mole in Hand is Worth 10x23

_Tear me down._

Take a stab.

Slice me.

Gut me.

Go on.

You know-

Why DON'T-

Please.

I dare you

If you're going to do something, then just _**do it**_

Ian never realized just how badly history smelled. He'd travelled in the past many times before, and it was true that his nose had discovered some very putrid events never recorded in history books, but after, either days or months later, his memory was able to paint over the stench and the unpleasant odours with wide, lemon-scented strokes of nostalgia. It was only during dark times, like now sneaking through the dank alleys behind the Luna Company's factory, when he could not escape the foul smells that accosted him. It was times like these that he really and truly appreciated how refreshing a good, bracing lungful of London fog really was.

"Don't you wish you could fly Mr Chesterton, like a hawk or a condor?" Susan had asked when they were both still at Coal Hill comprehensive. Ian had caught her daydreaming, again, during his lecture on Avogadro's Number, staring out the window at some pigeons in the street with wonder.

"I don't see how that's relevant to the question, Susan. Now, how much is in a mole?"

"I think you do, I think you'd like to fly…" Susan had a habit of ignoring his questions in lectures, just as someone else would be polite and overlook someone's unfortunate habit of stuttering, or perhaps in a similar fashion avert their gaze from an unsightly piece of spinach that had plastered itself to a front tooth of a friend. "Who wouldn't? I have once, just once. Just to see. The whole experience was…" Ian remembered the peculiar look in her eyes, as if she were staring down at Earth from above, as if she really had taken on the form of a cardinal and cast herself about the sky. "… breathless." Not 'breathtaking' as Ian had somehow expected, but "Breathless," as if the whole experience had been a great exertion for her.

"Susan, how much is a mole?" he had repeated stoically.

"6.02214179(30)×1023 mol-1" Susan smiled sadly at him. "A mole, you see," she treated the concept as if it were actually a small, ground-dwelling adorably furry mammal, "a mole isn't dimensionless, but has its very own dimensions…" And then Susan was gone again, her eyes drawn back to the window and the lonely birds, her mind drawn to who knew where.

Upon reflection, it was times like these that Ian wished he'd just taken the girl out for a shandy, got her hammered and got some decent answers out of her.

Not of course, he'd later learned, that alcohol had any affect on her species whatsoever.

Ian kept close to the fence, the rusty iron bars brushing against his clothes with muted sighs as he passed. If only Susan could fly, then perhaps she could soar back to him and save him the trouble of finding her. 

Ian had already lost Barbara and the Doctor, and he wasn't about to lose his only remaining friend. Not in London, of all places. He had checked the Tardis, but there was no sign of the young woman. The Luna Company had been the only lead he had.

It had taken hours, delving through Acavio's papers and scattered files, to find this address. Ian was convinced the man had employed a slug for a secretary, so bad was the handwriting and looping squiggles. Eventually, however, he'd found it.

And now he was standing before the main gates of Luna Company, its gaunt spiked teeth gnashing at the clouds that loomed above him.

_  
Who are you?_

What do you want?

What's-

Why won't you…?

Can you hear me?

I can feel…

I wish.

I…  
.

Even this late at night, production at the factory was still running at full steam. The production of what, he still had no idea.

It made Ian's task both easier and harder at the same time. He had waited by the gate until a new shift had come on and slipped in amongst their ranks. For their part, they seemed so tired that they did not even notice, or want to register, his presence. He managed to break from their number before entering the buildings; he wanted to scout round first, to ascertain the layout in case he needed to find another way out. But with so many workers roaming the area, he had to find ways to move around and avoid being seen.

Traversing the area in darkness was treacherous. The grounds outside the various warehouses were festooned with abandoned equipment whose angular, corroded corpses tugged at his heels and nipped at his shins. After his initial circuit, he counted fifteen buildings in total, the crest of each spiked with the brick-encrusted, cylindrical smokestacks that coughed and belched into the sky.

Knowing that time was of the essence, and that Susan's life, if she still possessed one, was dependant upon him, and with no better plan, Ian headed for the largest of the warehouses, the sprawling angular beast that squatted within the centre of the projects. He was still searching for a rear entrance or loading dock, when he spotted the two figures lurking in a shadowy corner- one standing over another, smaller figure that sat in the mud, her face pressed against the gritty wall. As soon as he was sure that it was Susan on the ground, Ian sprinted towards them and slammed himself against the man before he could draw a blade or firearm.

The man fell beneath his weight, but did not cry out, swallowing his astonishment and pain with tightly pressed lips. While angered, he didn't seem surprised to see Ian. Ian kept his own hands pressed about the stranger's throat, while with a quick glance, he saw that Susan appeared unharmed, albeit unconscious.

Oddly, the man did not try to pry Ian's hands off his neck, perhaps sensing that Ian would not actually throttle him. In the cold of the night, Ian felt warmed by the length of the man's body, felt the strength within the broad chest beneath him. Ian knew, somehow, that the man could throw him easily, should he want to. Disturbingly, the man's large arms slowly embraced Ian's own, placing his hands upon Ian's shoulders, gently, and with a wry grin, smiled at him.

Ian lifted himself up slightly, seeking safety in the few inches that separated them and tried to secure his grip on the man's neck. Aware that there were factory workers inside the building, he pressed his face close to that of the man's, determined not display his discomfort and hissed: "All right, time for some answers. Who are you?"

"Jameson." The man's smile slipped slightly with his reply, as if saddened. "Jameson Bainswick. I used to be Lord Bainswick…"


	8. Cardinal Merit

So long ago, and so far away. Yet our past is never far from us, no matter how far nor how fast we flee…

"Please, come in."

The look on the girl's face spoke for her: _I shouldn't be here _

Cardinal Kahalia spoke again, gesturing for "Susan" to take her seat. It was not her name, not her real name yet, but the Cardinal had dipped into the timelines and knew who she would soon be.

Susan lowered herself between the arms of the plush velvet chair, her motion awkward, a leaf settling upon the moist and uneven ground.

The Cardinal tapped the surface of the data screen in the air before her, a gentle, rhythmic tapping, staring at Susan through the red lettering and translucent file headers as she did so. Considering. "An unusual file. Quite remarkable, in many respects. Atrocious in others. Almost misleading. Almost."

The girl did not acknowledge the Cardinal's existence, nor her words. Her blank black eyes reflected the backward red glyphs, but nothing stirring beneath the glazes surfaces.

"Tetra-phoresis, tri-bio physics, molecular humecticantancy," the Cardinal rattled off the course names with an air of boredom. "Exemplary marks throughout. Particularly high scores for regenerative bio-morphological establishment… Goodness, a flutter wing?! My, there hasn't been one of those inside the Capitol dome in over a millennia. Must have been quite a sight. I am sorry I missed that, but I am so glad the Castellan is still such a dreadful shot. Still- less could be said of your attempts at quantum resurgency, temporal mechanics and magnetic transubstantiation." The Cardinal frowned a bit. "Do you know, I'm not at all sure what that last one even is…" She blinked at the exam marks. "Evidently, neither do you. Nonetheless, an erratic transcript of your time here in the Acadamy."

Susan remained nonplussed, remaining prim and upright within the luxurious chair, her hands placed precisely in her lap.

"Erratic… but incomplete." Cardinal Kahalia lazily shunted away the faux screen and pulled up another, one scrawled in shuddering, slanted gray script. "Trained in explosive ordnances, Shaolinquan, various forms of aikido from through out differing eras and planets of the western galaxies," she shook her head at Susan, "sounds quite exhausting. I've no idea where you found the time. And here's my favourite," she wasn't sure, but she thought she spied Susan's eyes squint to read the ashen pixelated text. "Psychic attenuation… off the scales… even for a Time Lord… of any age. Almost unbelievable offensive capabilities.

"Now why, I wonder, would that be? What would all this training be for? My first thought, well, naturally, every one's first thought, was that it was something to do with your lineage. But you must find that truly draining by now, being one of His last remaining descendants, the last of the line, etc etc and so on..." Kahalia stared at the child again, a long look, before dismissing the second screen. "But no. Nor, as tempting as it seems, do I believe that it has anything at all to do with your unfortunate parents. Such explanations are too easy, too convenient, not at all fitting the tendencies that you're exhibiting. I suspect, that there is very little to do with you at all that is convenient."

Cardinal Kahalia rose from behind her desk and turned away from her charge, staring out at the vista of the Capitol and the purple-rose mosaic that was the sky aflame with the setting suns. "I believe that it had to be something quite different. An outside factor influencing your behaviour, although at this point, I admit that I am not quite sure what... or whom." She kept her back to the girl, but could still see the vague form of her reflection in the panorama. "We may have never met before," Kahalia turned to face Susan, her tone ominous, "but one thing you should know: I am not fond of not knowing things.

"So," Kahalia concluded brightly, "I decided to cheat and pulled your bio-data extract from the Matrix, our little repository of the history of all Time Lords, past and present." With a flick of her nose she brought up a swirling mass of threads and nexi, a panoply of colour and form that twisted up into the air between them. "This," she delicately plucked a violet strand from the air, "is you. Will be you. Has been you." Kahalia had her attention now, those obscure black orbs studied the virtual thread in her hand and followed its slender length as it swirled and dove deep within the main, tangled mass. "And this," Kahalia fondled a slithering silver strand that intertwined with the violent-hued filament, twisting about it as if to choke it. "This, this is an incursion, one," she pulled at the silver thread, plunging her fingers deep within the matrix so that Susan could see that it threatened to swarm and strangle the main, intricate nexus that throbbed with in the centre. "One that threatens to infect all of Gallifrey. Now then, my dear little rebel," Cardinal Kahalia stepped through the virtual display and placed a meaty hand upon Susan's thin neck. "We can't allow that, now can we?"


	9. Let's Make A Deal

"Stop that."

Jacqui took a long, deliberate drag on her cigarette and let out a slow, billowing cloud that engulfed the settee on which her sister sat. "Make me."

Barbara sucked on her lower lip, reminding herself she was supposed to be trying not to let Jacqui get to her like this. Not any more. Her sister was nearly thirty, herself twenty-six. There was no reason for them to keep acting like they were back in primary school. Yet staring at her sister, perched on the edge of their mother's favourite chair, her long black hair done up in those ridiculous pigtails in some ghastly post-beatnik style, Barbara couldn't help but wonder why the older she got, the younger she acted.

"So," Jacqui tapped dusty ashes into her half-empty teacup, "seeing anyone?"

Barabara shifted in the uncomfortable cushions and cast a glance into the kitchen, sniffing the air as if she could determine how much longer it would be before the Sunday roast was done. The only thing to reach her senses, aside from the rich scent of stewing beef, was the clattering and tinny sounds of her mother clanging about in the cupboards. Barbara didn't blame her; if she had a choice, she'd hide in the kitchen too. "That's none of your business," she responded eventually.

Barbara wasn't being rude, she was just stating the truth.

Jacqui was not a normal fixture in mother's sitting room. Not in over a decade anyway. Jacqui, or rather _Theresa_, her long abandoned given name, had run off at seventeen to London with that awful Jonathan from Carrington Terrace, amid much scandal. She'd resurfaced six years later, dropping by one Tuesday for supper as if nothing had ever happened. Barbara had, at one point, inquired after the welfare of the child, to which Jacqui had replied, "Which one?"

Barbara stopped asking questions after that.

Jacqui began to pace the room, rummaging through her purse before pulling out another crumpled pack of smokes. She leant against the window, struggling with a lighter that spat out angry, lifeless sparks, but failed to cough up a flame. She kept the limp cigarette in her mouth and stared sadly out at the drizzling rain that smeared the thin panes. It hardly mattered, the pavement was grey, the streets were grey, the sky was grey… there wasn't anything worth seeing, not today. Barbara just knew Jacqui was finding it incredibly artistic. "Don't you want to know how Richard is?"

"Should I?" Barbara tilted her watch and fiddled with the strap. It was nearly three. She didn't know how much longer she could sit here like this. Richard was Jacqui's latest 'catch', a former builder who had decided to turn musician. Nothing that Barbara would be remotely interested in. Except, of course, for those startling blue eyes of his. Jacqui caught her staring once, just once, and had never let her forget it. "I wish you wouldn't come here."

"She's my mother too, you know."

Barbara waved away the smoke that still hung in the air, attempting to disperse Jacqui's nonsense as well. "If you need money, just ask me for it. Mother doesn't have any left to give you. There's no reason to keep coming round just to make everyone else miserable. It may be fun for you, but it certainly isn't for us."

Jacqui stared at her for a long moment. "Purple suede and tangerine moons, bubble storks and jubilee trees that sway in the early Sumatran sunlight."

Barbara rubbed her eyes in exasperation. Jacqui maintained that she never wanted to be remembered as being predictable. Fights and arguments were beneath her, she would announce, quite frequently. In Barbara's opinion, the problem was more that logic was above her sister's grasp. It certainly didn't help that she had seen her sister slip a small tablet into her mouth along with the first cigarette. Barbara rose, dressed in a gown of haughty irritation and stalked over to her coat, pulling out a tenner that she pressed into her sister's hand.

"Go, bubble stork. Be free." And leave us in peace.

Later that evening, when she and her mother poked and sucked at the pudding in silence, Barbara wondered if there would ever be a last time that she'd see her sister.

It just goes to show, Barbara reflected as she was strapped onto an interrogation table on a Victorian moon base in the middle of nineteenth century by two overly-muscled, scantily clad men, you really can never tell when it will be the last time you'll see someone you once loved.

Right now, Barbara found herself wanting to track Jacqui down. Right now, she wanted to be somewhere, anywhere else. It had been two years since she'd seen Jacqui. Or Richard for that matter. But she still remembered those eyes. Bainswick had the same, disturbing eyes, eyes too beautiful to be real. They belonged on magazines or painted in portraits. And now they wouldn't stop looking at her, appraising her.

Oh Jacs... if only you could see me now...

"Who are these… these things?" The over-sized reptilian-slug creature gurgled against a slathering tongue in grotesque electronic syllables.

"That, Sil, is what we intend to find out. Just give me some time." Lord Bainswick motioned the two umber stallions away and leant over Barbara's table. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the Doctor strapped to a similar table. He was quiet now, despite a tirade of much huffing and grunting when they were captured shortly after the new creature arrived. "Lovely culture we have, don't you think?" Bainswick smiled at her. "Would you imagine that, in all this clutter, I had no less than seventeen interrogation tables to choose from for you?" He stroked the wooden surface tenderly. "I thought this one matched your lovely eyes." 

"Oh, give it a rest!" The Doctor bellowed from the other table. "Such utter rubbish and theatrics, for goodness sake. Who do you think you are? A Spanish Inquisitor? Nonsense. I refuse to lie here and be tortured by an amateur."

Bainswick turned quickly towards him, in anger Barbara thought at first, but she saw amusement lightly pulling at his features instead.

"And you, you, Mentor, Sil, or whatever…" the Doctor continued. "I know what you're up to up here, in this ridiculous moon base thing you've set up and that infantile rocket to boot…"

The creature, Sil, waved angrily to his servants. "Closer, closer." Grasping his litter, they carried him closer towards the Doctor. Sil leant over the old man, the creature's food bowl threatening to tip sickly green dollops of ooze onto the Doctor's chest, as he hissed expectantly.

The Doctor, for his part, barely looked at him, staring off instead in a bored manner, as if wanting to slip away for a nap during a particularly dull cricket match.  
"I know what you're doing," he said more quietly, "shipping all these thing and people up here right under the noses of You Know Who… do you really think they wouldn't notice?"

Sil hissed and gurgled angrily.

"But," the Doctor added with a smile, "I can help you do it properly, so they'll never know…"


	10. Editing History

Snatches of conversation drifted down to rustle lightly against her ears, like the whispering brush of falling leaves, but she paid them little heed. Her eyes were open, it was true, but they were barely aware.

There was so much inside her head. Where there had been one voice, there were many. Which was fine. The burble of soft whispers in her head was welcoming, probing, soothing... but there was something else, drip, drip, dripping into her head, soaking in slowly at first, gently, but now it was sloshing across her mind like a dark and foamy tide, seething down into her soul.

Ian seemed so fragile compared to the other, massive man beside him, Susan thought, staring at them as they squatted together above her. Ian appeared uneasy in a way that she had never seen before, leaning towards the man to listen to his hushed words, but pulling subtly backwards in hesitant, twitching motions as if afraid to come too close.

Susan understood the concepts of sexuality between members of the same sex, and understood Ian's revulsion and attraction, his revelation at how deeply the two newly discovered emotions mixed, but Susan had little use for them herself. Her own people rarely used their sexuality, and kept it stashed away as if it were an expensive roadster, hidden beneath a sheet in a locked garage, only taking it out for a spin on special occasions. But her species was fully functional and equipped. After all, for her kind, a body was nothing more than a tool.

Or more specifically, a weapon.

After all, when you're a member of the most powerful race in all of space and time, why skulk about as a biped?

"Look, I'm just not following you. Why did you try to kill me, why take Susan?"

"I was watching her, at the Exhibition... she can get me close, close to the man who uses my name, my title."

The words slipped into Susan's mind, skimming the surface like droplets of oil before being absorbed by the growing darkness within her.

There was something else there, that now lunged out and struck, hard.

Memories, sharp and quick, sliced through the synapses of her brain like a paper cut, deep and stinging, letting other, forbidden memories bleed through:

The vision was sharp, metallic, the surfaces within it tinged with unnatural highlights of silver and blue.

They had bound her, strapped her down, arms and legs pinned with steel, head clamped with an unforgiving lattice-work of stabbing pins...

Despite the sheer economy of force fields, they could not match the brute physicality, the terror of gleaming metal.

It was her, her own memories, she could see out of her eyes, feel all the sensations, but she had no recollection of this ever happening; it was like being shoved through a waterfall and finding yourself in another body on the other side- it was shocking, breath-taking. Horrifying.

She was still numb with disbelief of awareness, and without thought she extruded her fingers into translucent tendrils, their gentle ends feeling the steel clasps for release, their motions fluid and tender, a tremble of awe tingling through her, this new skill, this wondrous ability...

When the force knife sliced her hand off at the wrist, the air danced with the red spray from her spurting artery and pain, wrapped in shock, slammed against the inside of her ears: echoing, impossible, unbearable.

It was only when she saw her flesh re-grow itself that she knew where she was... or more accurately, where she had been. For this really was a memory, nothing more, of a past she'd never knew.

A Susan, of sorts.

She could hear it now, now that she knew what must be happening: a high pitched hum, the only indication that her body was still in regenerative flux-

Her people had mastered bodily regeneration ages ago, and under the proper conditions and technology, it could be used as an unmatched method of therapy, of healing, or infinite torture. Which meant this was her home world. And that it was her own people doing this to her.

Torturing her.

With her growing awareness, as one might feel the white and raised tissue of a forgotten scar upon one's leg, Susan could begin to sense the past torment, the past injury inflicted on this, her first mind.

In disgust, Susan tried to pull back, to shudder her way out of this memory, to reel backwards to the present, to Ian, to Grandfather, to a life she knew, but something caught her and held her.

"That man, he's using my name and my wealth to spread these, these 'devices', across all of England."

"But why?" Ian's voice, so far away, felt so warm, so comforting, but Susan could not reach it. She could see, with her dead and glossy eyes, shadowy forms appearing behind Ian, scattered, but gathering, pressing silently closer.

But she was still in the moment, still in the memory, and as helpless as ever.

Above her pinned and bloodied form, spiraling down out of the ceiling like a piercing drill, a massive crystal spike was lowered to rest upon her forehead, the point of pressure hinting at the massive weight of the form above. She watched with fascination as its rapid spinning slowed to a stop, poised, seeming ready to burst down, through her skull.

Instead, there was a quiet gurgle, and she sensed rather than saw, the fluid coursing down along the edge of the twisted, clear surface.

The hiss the liquid screamed at the air as it traveled toward her called its name as surely as it might have shouted at her with a chorus of a thousand voices: _shalinai_.

_Shalinai_ was an acid, of sorts, designed for interrogating of the worst life form her people had ever encountered. And they were about to use it on her.

She tried to pull away, tried to regen her head into something new, something out of the way of the touch of the-

Too late.

The fluid, an intelligent acid, licked its way into her brain, frying through the gray and pulpy flesh, slipping into her capillaries, gushing through her veins, forcing its way along the red tide until it splashed against every nerve fibre of her body and burned.

Susan screamed.

Yet the voice was not hers.

Another voice, in her head, her 'old' voice that belonged to the person's head she was in, who was not yet her, said, 'Stop.'

And it did.

"I've watched him," the man, Bainswick, continued in the deep whisper of a voice, causing Ian to press closer once more, keenly aware again of the man's presence, and warmth in this cold night. "Like your friends you described, people step within the vanishing tower, yet not always out again. Sometimes not for days." His voice seemed to drop even softer, causing Ian to wonder if the man was doing it intentionally. "I even managed to-"

Ian never saw the blow, only found himself lunging towards the rock wall of the factory, and white punches of light battered his mind before he found himself on his back, his arms over his face, instinctively trying to ward off the blows of the men who'd found them, who must have snuck up on them. Ian kicked and rolled, thrashing as much as possible, trying to gain some space to pull himself up, out of the cluster of three men who hit and stank and barked yells in his ears that still rang from crashing into the wall. The wall… he tucked his head into his chest and pushed himself off the ground just enough to get his back upon the wall, and then kicking against the wall itself, he launched himself backwards, causing all of them to tumble onto the muddy ground.

A moment. He needed a moment to get his bearings, awareness, tactics… there were five of them on Bainswick, alternatively getting thrown off by his massive shrugs and then tossing themselves back on again, gradually wearing him down, sapping his strength, and tearing his jacket and shirt into the mud.

When the shovel came at Ian's face out of the darkness, he didn't have time to react.

Fortunately, he didn't have to.

A slender hand appeared out of the night and grasped the shovel.

The SLAP of the impact of shovel and hand was enough to cause Ian to slam backwards onto the ground.

"Enough."

It was a word, only a word. Simple. Firmly spoken. But only a word.

Ian couldn't believe his eyes.

Susan stood above him, her outstretched hand grasping the shovel just below the blade, a tiny figure in the darkness, all trace of her stupor gone. The seven men who'd set upon them paused in their attack to stare at her.

And then, as one, they came at her.

And the shovel danced like an ember from a hearth, the dim light somehow managing to catch its dull blade as it arced through the night, hacking and whirling with deadly precision. The air rang with the thick sounds of thuds and splatters. And then, when Susan lowered it for a final time, there was only silence.

When it was over, Ian remembered to exhale. But he dared not speak, lest Susan slaughter him too.

Perhaps because it was from such a harmless source, or perhaps because his head was still throbbing with adrenaline and pain, but the fear that stilled his heart when he looked at Susan was greater than any feeling of dread that he'd ever experienced.


	11. Dew the Right Thing

Charcoal fluff and leathery feathery gumdrops soaked in dew and raspberry mittens.

Which, on the whole, was not what Barbara was expecting.

There was one thing that she never liked to admit to anyone, ever, about her old job. Something that got her up every morning on those dark, cold winter days, something that gave her strength to face those bleary, spotted faces that looked straight through her with sixty glazed eyes. It had occurred to her one day after her third year, nibbling on a damp and soggy tuna sandwich by herself in the corner, apart from staff and students, when she found herself staring into the oily surface of her gritty coffee, watching the stray bits of bread hugging the porcelain walls of the cup's edge that stood tall and unforgiving above them, that there was a very obvious reason why she'd become a teacher.

It had occurred to her, but she'd dismissed it as being self-indulgent, unpleasant, and quite possibly even true.

It was something that Jacqui had picked up on the second Barbara announced that she was going to be a teacher. It was a dismissive, bored comment that had dribbled out of Jac's mouth and onto Barbara's back as she'd headed out the door to school one day: "Well at least you'll be able to control one thing in your life." Barbara had forgotten it, until that day in the cafeteria.

Control. Reluctant or not, Barbara had to admit that she had control, of her pupils, of their life, and hers. For eight hours of the day, there was discipline and schedule, no deviation, nothing that she couldn't dictate. And woe betide anyone who dared contradict her.

There were so few jobs where you got paid to whack juveniles over the head with idioms like that, let alone make them write one out five hundred times for snogging in the hallway between classes.

Control was what Barbara was currently losing grasp of, in horrible, ghastly shudders as the world the interrogation table stuttered and blurred.

All she was certain of, was that Jacqui would have paid good money for this experience...

For no good reason, to her left lay the console room of the Ship, gleaming and white, the ormolu clock angular and shiny, comforting, yet taken together both seemed somewhat wrong, in the wrong place, the wrong shape.

Above her, somehow, where the ceiling should be, was her classroom, stretching upwards, although she appeared to be looking at her class from her desk as she always did. Her class seemed not bothered to be vertical: they looked as they always did, bored and vacant, scribbling half heartedly at their tablets.

In the drawing room that lay to her right, seemingly oblivious to everything, her mother spooned endless sugars into her tea cup, while her sister carved something vulgar into the wooden table with a spiral knitting needle.

All of this misplaced geometry, geography and genealogy fit together somehow, dada style, just as it would in a dream.

In a dream though, she would not be wide awake.

In a dream, she would not be able to feel the black opal ring that had been slipped upon her finger, felt the tingle as it released the strange chemicals into her bloodstream.

And in a dream, she was certain there would be no Bainswick looming over her.

Well, fairly certain.

Either way, there should be absolutely no reason for him to be able to see what she was seeing. Impossible as it was, she saw him ponder the classroom scene, linger momentarily over the angry, listless form of her sister, before his eyes pounced upon the alien form of the Tardis console.

This was not good.

She had to… she needed control… there was none.

She lay there, helpless, hating herself, hating the Doctor for vanishing with that reptile Sil so long ago. Angry for stepping into that stupid rocket. Angry at Ian for so many, many things that she never could say, always wanted to say but was never able, because, really, the person she was angry at was herself, always angry at herself, for failing, for never being the person in control she wanted to be, losing her life, losing those stupid Aztecs, losing Ian again and again and-

The images around her shimmered, out of focus, just for a moment. Tlotoxl standing at the altar of Aztec temple had blinked into, then out of existence so fast, Barbara almost missed it.

Bainswick blinked, stepping backwards from the image of the console, uncertain, hesitant.

She was losing it, Barbara knew. Losing, losing, losing. She couldn't control the drug, but by God, if she was going loopy, she was going to go loopy all the way. Her way.

She could do it, she could protect Ian and Susan and the Doctor and the Tardis.

Staring at Bainswick, she finally had someone to unleash her anger at that really deserved it, who wasn't her.

After a moment, seething with rage at her interrogator, staring at his smug expression, it was easy.

Vivaldi tap dancing with Akhenaten in front of the pyramids.

Michael Faraday slapping Vasco de Gama upside the head with a soup spoon.

Trotsky and Picasso ice skated in diamond loops around Caligula, on syrup plains and coconut shavings. Anne Boleyn fought with William Wallace with liquorice whips and swords of brie.

Khafra, Bismark and Bronte backflipped across the lunar plains.

Madness? You want madness? Barbara shouted with her mind, I've got three thousand years of history in my head, facts and figures, the insane and the great. She frowned and screamed and let every memory, every useless fact, name and face blast into the rooms around her.

Eleanor of Aquitaine and Kitchener and Matilda and Ireton and Mussolini and Agricola and Erasmus and Tyndale and Ramses and Lousa May Alcott fought and danced and bit and hacked and kissed and screamed in a forest, on a mountain, in a farm, across the stars, as large as planets, as small as death, endless images that swirled and heaved about Barbara, sloshing the drawing room and school and console room in madness and insanity and foam and spit and history without boundaries, timelines drawn in only the way Barbara saw them, how she unconsciously drew them in our head, in her head, all of history, but not in a line, as the Doctor might see them, but in a massive tangled ball of memories and things that she felt was important, memorable, possible, unleashed in flames of confusion around her until the world went quiet and white.

As she slipped into unconsciousness, she only hoped Bainswick was left with no knowledge of what he'd seen of the Tardis.


	12. Standing Guard

Silver and white scalloped walls leapt upwards from the floor, mother-of-pearl surfaces shimmering as they merging seamlessly above the old man, this Doctor, as he followed Sil into the chamber. Little did the Doctor know that he was being watched, his every move and expression monitored. In fact, he was sure the Doctor was fully aware of it, but just couldn't be bothered to take it into account.

The old man was like all the others in so many ways, and yet…

He had changed so much.

The hair was silver, the eyes beady and wet amid the wrinkles and waxen skin. It was obvious as he stared about him that he realized that this vast room had not been there only minutes before. The man peered and poked at the nearest crenulated surfaces, the jewelled ring on his knobbly fingers sparked a striking azure against the frosted white surface of the wall. His fingers tenderly caressed the surface, as if feeling its pain from when the gel had first frozen into place, trembling and cracking against the hard blows dealt by the vacuum and solar radiation outside.

Shrugging off his scientific curiosity as if it were an irritating gnat, the Doctor approached Sil once more, stopping to tower over the clutch of plush cushions that sagged and wilted under the damp, reptilian form. "I fail to see how you managed to convince your Triumverate of the profitability of this venture…"

"Profitability?" Sil waved a bit of speelsnape about in emphasis, the miniature, mucus dripping corpse only centimetres from the Doctor's face. "There's nothing unprofitable about it, Doctor!" Sil's voice lingered in the syllables 'Doc' and 'Tor', his syrupy green eyes probing the Doctor's own, as if searching for something… revulsion? Treachery? Recognition perhaps? "Low over head, cheap labour, pristine goods…"

"Yes, yes,yes…." The Doctor parried and blocked the proffered dead creature with a waggling finger, forcing Sil to eventually chomp on the snape in agitation. "All very good, this antiques smuggling, right under Their very noses… very neat trick with the soil… entangled particles I assume, instantaneously swapping one place for the other… Pedomantry indeed! Nothing could seem lower tech, and yet you'd need a very strong grasp of quantum cohesion… yet an instant matter transmitter… and no one's the wiser, with a certain amount of flair of course…"

Sil sneered, motioning for his slaves to moisten him with scented sprays of mineralized water. "That was not my idea…"

"Mmmmm?"

At that moment, the door to the council room opened and Bainswick skulked in, his normally cocky form was dishevelled, his clothes askew, appearing to be nursing a massive hangover.

"Ah… yes," the Doctor hoisted his own lapels as if bracing himself before a particularly troublesome pupil, "the rocket man…"

"Well?" Sil barked, the light on his translator sputtering will his slavering syllables.

Bainswick shook his head slowly, his eyes pressed shut, evidently wishing he were somewhere else, far, far away.

The Doctor must have sniffed something afoul in the air between them, for his eyes gleamed bright and his head spun back to Sil's. "Well? Well, what? What have you been up to? What have you done with Barbara, eh?"

Sil hissed ominously, but said nothing. His stunted, writing tail, however, spoke volumes.

Before the Doctor could press further, Bainswick's gravely voice spat out something equivalent to: "She's fine." Along with some thick, sporadic cursing.

The Doctor examined Bainswick with a quick eye and dealt him an amused snort before pressing on. "So you covertly extract merchandise from a specific era, unobtrusively, and then sell on the goods…"

Sil was typing numbers into a monitor, nodding when needed, but otherwise ignoring the Doctor who began to pace the chamber, occasionally examining the thick crystal pillars that stabbed up from the floor in irregular intervals. Their uneven, squat forms jutted to a stop just above the man's eye height, the thick crystalline walls obscured the details of the creatures trapped within, but not their number, or their writhing movement.

"That much I'd already worked out," the Doctor said in a tone that was not quite convincing, apparently ignoring the contents of the pillars for now, "but as for the seller… the seller… they'd have to be time-active, otherwise they'd have no idea of the importance of genuine era artefacts to buyers... who must also surely be in the future…but if these sellers, if they can time travel, they've certainly no need for you… unless of course, you are time active as well?" The Doctor's voice also failed to hide the horror of this thought.

Sil's claw, its slick, mottled green and brown skin textured like that of a rotting leaf, pawed at the air in disinterest. "We were commissioned, simple audit and tracking to manage and assess… we'll be returned by the client once we've completed acquisition and inventory. I must compile my expense report..."

The Doctor's eyes flashed around the room in irritation, coming to rest for a moment on my own. They held mine for a long moment, more time than he'd paid attention to me in my entire life, yet unable to grasp the context of my gaze, his darted away quickly, like a butterfly caught by a sudden breeze.

"Speaking of profitability, Doctor," said Sil at last, somehow seeming to savour the man's name for once, as if the creature finally accepted, as I just had, that this Doctor had not yet encountered us before. "You said you could help… in exchange for your lives, to protect us from the Time Lords."

At the question I noticed the Doctor's head snap sharply down, as if searching for a diversion, and finding a pillar by his feet. "Mmmm? Yes, yes of course. I can help you… of course I can. Shielding, of course, for your generators, I've got some ideas on that… and as for your little smoke and mirrors show down below… Now then, what's this?" He pressed his face closer to the surface and the smothered, squirming creatures within. "Or should I say who is this?

There was a clank, as the something within slammed against the region closest to the Doctor's face. He jerked backwards, dignity momentarily abandoned, before he adjusted himself and glowered heavily at the offensive wall.

"E-nough!" Sil's fist slammed into the cushioned armrest, sending up spurts of goo and green mist. "Enough talk! Tell me where your transport is or you will die!"

The Doctor refused to turn, refused to acknowledge the outburst, speaking quietly to the crystalline pillar instead. "Die, will I? I doubt that very much, very much indeed."

It was evident that Sil heard the words, yet silence sat and squirmed in the air between them, seeming to heat the dry, frigid air of the moon base.

Even I, standing safe by my comrades along the wall, felt a flush burning up along my skin with the tension that seemed to make the air shiver with its invisible friction.

"Doctor," Sil began slowly. "I do hope you realize that with or without you or your ship, the profit margins on this venture alone outweigh any benefits you or your possesions could provide… and the client already has transtemporal capability… so you see, you don't seem to realize that this time I-don't-care what your answer is."

I was watching closely and I saw the Doctor's back stiffen as he caught Sil's verbal slip, and for the first time I saw uncertainty seize hold of the Doctor's features and pull them tight, as realization seemed to dawn that, not only had he lost the upper hand, but that he'd never, in fact, had it.

Fear is a wonderful, terrible, thing to watch as it devours a living thing, encompassing every pore, inhabiting every muscle, every sinew, every throbbing vein, spreading instantly throughout the body like a toxin.

For me, to watch a Time Lord sweat in its invisible grip was simply exhilarating.


	13. Happy Endings

Ian was nine when Jeremy died.

Death tasted of brick dust and anise.

It had been a bright, cloudless day in March in that endless space between school and supper... skipping their chores and slipping between the legs of their mother's who were frantically airing out sheets to catch the strange and foreign sun, the two boys raced through the streets, round the corner to where the devastation still lingered. The chill of spring pinched at their cheeks and bit at their freshly skinned knees as they dodged and clambered over the wreckage, over the crumbling brick and twisted bits of stoves and lamps, and haggard, sagging sofas.

Jeremy had gotten ahead when Ian stopped to pee inside the dented and cavernous mouth of a rotting oven that echoed and roared with his splashes. Now Ian sprinted after him, his tiny little feet somehow finding footholds among the shifting and pointy debris within these ruined blocks of houses. These places marked the seeping scabs of Old London, its dry and crumbling flesh still bled bricks and mortar onto the pavements, sighing onto the streets. The War had ended with treatise and trials, heroes and marches, unemployment and sugar and eggs and milk, but these buildings, shelled and flattened, remained. Their gaping windows and doors were as vacant and dark as the eyes of the veterans who often sat within the remains of their homes, or wandered the streets at night, restless and shouting.

To all of these things, Ian was oblivious. To him the war had been shadows and thunder; sleepless nights where screams of bombs and children had quickly seeped into the morning light, where memory faded, taking horrors back into the darkness of forgetfulness. But today, today it was gorgeous and sunny and Jeremy had nicked a packet of allsorts from Mr. Tucker and, still sprinting ahead, he was just out of Ian's reach.

Jeremy was eleven when he died that day.

Taller than Ian by three inches, his spiky blond hair was almost invisible against the bright sun. A white paper packet of liquorice was in his left hand, a sticky piece in his other hand, and he'd looked back to wave his trophy and the tip of his foot went just so-

Ian blinked

the shockwaves passed through Ian's slight body, shaking the cells of his cerebellum like clots of jelly falling upon the floor

and suddenly he was fifteen feet away, slammed horizontally at the base of the old post office, his ears useless, his face bleeding, his vision smeared as he stared at the spattered bits of blood and awful white flesh that stood stark against the violent, gritty surface of smouldering brick and the gentle patter of dust and ash, sprinkling gently down upon his chest.

Now, over a hundred years earlier, in the black and soggy mud of a factory yard, Ian lay once more against a wall in shock, his ears echoing, his face dripping with blood and sweat and wondered how it could be that love, that wonder, that pain, that sorrow, that shame, that guilt could all fade, could all be muffled with the blanket of time, but terror and death still evoked the exact same revulsion that it had all those years ago.

Susan had turned her scowling attention to the towering wall of the factory that stood twenty feet way, raised an empty hand and simply tugged at the air before her.

The bricks of the wall leapt apart, scattering with a tremendous explosion, blanketing Ian and Bainswick with a thick coat of dust and rubble.

Susan, or the creature that he'd known as Susan, advanced through the wreckage, picking her way almost daintily with precise, quick movements; her attention was focused at the contents inside the building that Ian could only just glimpse: brass pulleys and brackets, and hundreds, thousands of thick glass canisters-

Guards, proper guards, attacked then in force, with the angry cough of gunfire and the scream of attacking madmen.

Susan didn't break her stride. One at a time, the guards fell as if pole axed, invisibly brained. Then, as if she were bored of the routine, and the bricks about her feet took to the air, slowly at first, in a jerky and halting dance, then faster and faster, spiralling around her in a maelstrom of red and mortar, a swirling storm of rock and grit that smacked and hurled against her remaining attackers, while she strolled safely within the eye, stepping causally over the ruined lip of the wall and into the factory's spoilt innards.

The hurricane of brick and mud continued to boil and swirl in her wake, crunching against the skulls of her remaining attackers, while the rest, those that had any sense left at all fled into the shadows of the deepening night.

Clink.

Clunk.

Clink clink clunk clink clunk clinkclunkclunkclunkclunkclunkclunkclunk…

As the last of the bricks thudded and splattered into the mud around him, Ian realized that he was regaining his hearing, realized in sputtering, shuddering moments of time that began to speed up, that began to return to normal in spurts, and awareness stuttered back into his head, he felt Bainswick's arms about him, lifting him up, helping him stagger across the mud, over the bodies, over the rubble, coming to rest at last against the ruins of the main wall, to stare inside, to stare at Susan as she stood among what seemed a hundred thousand of the gleaming, thick glass bell jars that housed a hundred million of the slugs that all seemed to be pointed at her looking eyelessly at her, waiting…

And in that moment, watching what had happened to a young girl that he knew, a young girl that he cared about in ways he'd only just now realized, not as a pupil, but as a younger sister, as part of his strange and insane family, watching her now, he felt the same sadness, the same deep, wrenching emotion that the shower of bricks and dust had brought back to him from that sad, wonderful March day… the sadness of watching something beautiful die- to be replaced by something... else.

And the creature that had been Susan looked to the ruined roof of this vast building and clapped her hands together above her head.

A hundred thousand jars shattered.


	14. Personal Baggage

One Year Previous

"History… depends upon who you talk to…"

Uncle had always said like that to Jameson when he was a boy. At first, he had found his uncle's presence annoying, but now looked back upon it with gratitude, for when he'd turned just twelve, his father and mother seemed to lose interest in him, developing distaste for him even, for which Jameson only later understood the reason. At the time, however, his forced separation from his family had only fuelled his adolescent rage at the world.

"There are two kinds of history: what transpires from moment to moment, the millions of events occurring between millions of people, creatures, things, across the world; then, of course, there is History. That is what wars are fought over."

It was his Uncle, at about the same time, that took Bainswick under his wing.

"History is shaped, defined… smoothed in places, while other bits are lopped off, abandoned, buried, and what's left behind would resemble the decaying remnants scattered across a battlefield, limbs, corpses, offal- all of the awkward stuff that doesn't fit the official version of events. It is for the best, of course, and best forgotten. Still, every once and a while, it's handy to know what you've done with those severed bits that were left behind."

It was Jameson's uncle that first took him to this place, to the Library of St. John the Beheaded, just off Strathmore Street.

Lord Bainswick strode through the soaring marble archways that lay hidden behind the decrepit façade of the apothecary, his silver-tipped cane tiny in comparison to his towering, cloaked figure as it tapped rhythmically upon the slate grey tiles. Fergus, the little weasel of a man, was perpetually bent over the stained, yellowed pages of the ledger and studiously avoided meeting his gaze. Which was how it had always been, and as it should be.

Bainswick walked confidently through the dimly lit halls and shadowy enclosures; dark places that held ancient secrets that skulked under rusted locks, bound chains, twisted cables and prayer cloths. He continued on, lengthening his stride as he stalked through the endless rows of shelves crammed with scrolls and papers of all shapes and sizes, some surely from Alexandria, others even older, their origins even more disturbing. Statues from across the globe, some bearing visages that belonged not to our world and a single glimpse would strike terror into a lesser man, yet Bainswick did not even deign to spare them more than a bored glance. There was so much in here, in this vast warehouse of secrets that the government was not ready to share, that their agents had scoured the world for, everything from meteorites to the corpses of fallen angels, and yet it was not these that he was after. He'd walked these halls since he was a boy thanks to the patronage of his uncle. Now, however, their musty, ancient chambers held little wonder for him any more.

Even to him though, there were some doors that had never opened, places he'd never been able to gain access to.

Which was why he was here once again, so many years after he'd bid his kith and kin farewell and boarded the Rosalie for its final, doomed, voyage. So much had changed in those years spent wandering lost and forgotten, all the while making his way back home to the world he thought he lived in. When he'd said goodbye to the shores of England, he hadn't known he was saying goodbye to everything he thought he would become. A Lord he was still yes, in both title and wealth. Yet when he'd boarded the ship, after being ejected from his studies from overindulging in certain excesses, which was saying something given the behaviour of most of the professors in those not-so hallowed halls, when he'd left he was just as tall, yet young. Slight and awkward. Energetic. Hopeful. Naïve.

The world abroad had cured him of these ailments. Refined his tastes. Scarred his body and mind, wounds carved deep by the harsh claws wielded by Life- and the occasional well-armed foreigner. More importantly, however, he had encountered a creature, washed up upon a red sand beach on the shores of Africa, its limbs broken and twisted against the rocks and fallen logs, all victims of a colossal storm whose fearsome, antic lights had raged long into the early hours. The creature had already begun to rot, which was perplexing, and its body unsalvageable, yet amongst the thick, metallic folds of its robes, savaged by a rent that exposed the pulpy, decaying flesh beneath, he discerned a shape within that he'd seen once before: an emblem engraved above an alcove that a much younger Bainswick had strayed near once long, long ago.

Reaching into the leather purse that he kept secreted about his person, he opened the knotted drawstring carefully to withdraw the silver corpse from within and dangled its slender, limp form above the twisting seal that lay in the centre of the low, octagonal altar. It lay there, glistening wetly under the dim candles that flickered with the strange, odd breezes that passed through the wandering halls. During the months that it had taken to return to London, Bainswick had poked and toyed with the slack form, twisting the creature into thousands of shapes, trying to match it to the one that lingered in his memory. He tried again now, pushing it into the complex grooves, when suddenly, the form, like the sigh of a wounded animal exhaling its last breath, seemed to relax under his fingers, looping easily to match the pattern of the seal.

From that moment on, when the gasp of the casket opened before him, flooding his lungs with the strange, bitter air, from when he first spied the numerous little forms writhing within the blue, alien soil, a year of Bainswick's life seemed to expand and contract as if only a moment had passed: from discovering that the creatures could detect oncoming storms, from founding the factory, from the strange creatures that appeared out of nowhere in the dark of night above the casket, to finding a copy of himself lunging out of the darkness of his bedroom and bludgeoning him, to finding himself left for dead within a shallow grave, his name and life taken over by something completely other, to finding the girl and the man, to the attack at the factory, to helping carry the man to the strange little box-

-to stepping across the threshold into a world of white that surrounded him, threatened to swamp him, smearing his vision with light and enveloping him with a dull, reassuring drumming...

Staring at the little girl who confidently twisted dials and threw levers at the wide crystalline table at the centre, Bainswick somehow knew that whoever built this could control History, in every aspect.


	15. When I grow up oh, I did?

_Wake up._

_Please, wake up._

Susan was drowning. There simply wasn't room inside her any more. Too many voices.

She'd hurt people- killed probably. And her telekinesis… it terrified her.

And thrilled her.

But she was so numb, so remote, it was hard to feel much of anything.

"Dreams. They came to me in dreams, spoke to me in my dreams. Told me what they could do."

Bainswick's voice drifted into her, but when he spoke it, she was not sure. Was it at the factory, was it in the console room? Did it only come to her now because it was relevant, because it related to the thought, her thoughts, trying to keep them straight, but they were not her own. It was like controlling a stream, a brook, a flood.

She could not control them, could not direct them. The best she could do was deflect them with her own, as if she were standing in the river, the water rushing around her waist, diverging around her briefly before converging again behind her, rushing onwards toward…

Toward what?

The console was beneath her fingers, pulsing, welcoming, breathless. It was helping, helping her focus. But her hands moved without thought, flicking controls and commands that she never knew existed.

There was a Plan. She knew that. There were several, in fact, but holding on to a concept was like trying to squeeze an ice cube: it kept sliding out of her grasp, vital information melting away with every second.

And it hurt.

Chesterton. Where was Ian? Where had she sent him?

She couldn't remember. The new her, the old her, whoever she was… was too strong, brought back, activated by… but it can't be the slugs, she knew their voices, they were harmless, lost, confused, but…

Grandfather had taken her to a show once, a stage show in a grubby London theatre in the back end of the nineteenth century, with stiff, creaking seats and foul smelling… she tried to focus on the sense, the smells, the sounds, trying to stay in the moment, and a hypnotist, there was a hypnotist, on stage with a quivering, silly, terrified woman… and he was trying to mesmerize her… and the woman had leapt up and tried to attack the artiste, as a true male Viking warrior is likely to do… Utter nonsense, Grandfather had said, shameless actors, charlatans, past life regression claptrap.

Unless of course, Susan would like to point out to him the next time she saw him, you happen to be a Time Lord.

Oddly, she was the one who felt like a stranger in her own head, not the other way round.

There was also the background burble of the voices of the creatures, crying for help.

They were like slugs, it was true, both in shape and form. Like slugs they too could sense the quantum disturbances that fluxed and rallied before an oncoming storm. The devices Bainswick manufactured, that he was trying to get stationed at every port across Europe, across the world, did work, but that was only the tip…

Yet somewhere within them, within the constant consonants that echoed in the backwaters of her head, there was something else. Something that stung her if she tried to focus on it too hard.

The poor creatures had been perverted, so long ago.

It was something that had triggered this, that had brought herself, her other self, back.

Susan could feel the Ship tensing as it readied itself to land, its very essence trembling with anticipation for the tasks that she was setting for it, as if it were a diver poised on the edge of a precipice, toes curling over the edge above the distant waves that crashed far below, poised to fling itself, hurl itself towards its Fate.

Commands, thoughts, orders rushed through her head, concepts and beliefs, memories and fears, training and death, frustration and resistance- she tried to pull back tried to pulllllll bacccck

and she saw…

and gasped.

It was if everything around her had turned into stained glass, as if she could see the seams, the black lead that separated everything, and yet joined them together. The more she pulled back, the more space she saw, the more she saw how they connected, how they were linked, how they were fragmented…

space, time, her homeworld, Earth, it's Moon, the slugs, the Mentors, transmats, the galaxy, the time lines, the trap, the Plan, the Tardis, her life, her other life, her other, other life - how old was she? How many regenerations had she already had??? She saw what she'd become, what Grandfather had spawned from, what they would both become, how Ian would die, how Barbara would grieve, and the silver, the slicing, searing silver threads that speared through them all,

And in a blink, a snapping, rushing mental blink, she was back, reeling, her fingers biting into the console for support.

She was hypersensitive now, her neurons rubbed raw. She curled into a mental ball, rocking silently in the back of her head, watching herself as if from under the bed.

But she could still feel the Ship roaring as it shoved aside space, time, air, atoms and life to pull itself back into reality with a savage raging yell.

And she saw herself leap out through the doors of the ship and dance through the ranks of the Mentor's guards, reaping blood and death.

_Wake up._

_Please, wake up._


	16. Impact

A raindrop, before it slams onto the ground, is a thing of tragic geometric beauty. A miracle of surface tension, gravimetric forces and optical refraction, the raindrop is a miniature world formed by chance and held together by sheer will, its destruction inevitable.

But for a short time before impact, in the breath of a moment, its complexity and simplicity is nothing short of wondrous, as if for one brief second, everything seems to make sense.

If one only takes the time during the storm to look:

Barbara, lying upon the cold table, is waking up from her dreams of history, a cluttered nonsensical montage, that she is only now beginning to reorder her own thoughts inside her aching head, pushing aside pangs of guilt and betrayal, of lost family and casual, bitter remarks she'd decided to forget she'd ever said to people she'd loved and scorned... sorting through her personal history, glossing over her uncertain, unplanned, impossible future that she'd stumbled into, focusing on the pain and the drama, certain not to focus on other thoughts, common thoughts, like what was she going to do about her life, her career, about Ian. Plain thoughts. Dull thoughts. But it was these thoughts that kept her awake at night, filled her nightmares. Not the monsters...

In another chamber, a Mentor guard, one of a subdued race long overlooked, stares at the Doctor, watching the alien's face, knowing that this Time Lord could encounter him a thousand times and never once be aware of his presence, of his existence. The old man was startled, fear carved into his wizened features at his lord Sil. The guard smiled, relishing what was to come next...

Ian, chilled, wet and still slightly in shock from recent events, knelt in the mud outside the Crystal Exhibition Palace where Susan had left him moments before. The cold, glistening framework loomed into the dark night sky behind him, its murky interior hinting at the deep and twisting shadows that lay within, while its metal and glass faces glinted the bright moonlight. Spread out before him loomed the churned up soil where the rocket had once stood; the strangely insectoid metallic shell of the vessel had been removed for the night, leaving only Ian, staring up at the full moon, wondering where up there Barbara was, and what on Earth they were going to do with Super Susan if they survived. There was still the scent of brick dust on his jacket, and the taste of fear still fresh against the roof of his mouth, stale and bitter...

Bainswick, the proper Bainswick, sat on the floor, his back against the wall of this strange, white room, staring at the tiny shoulders of the raven haired girl as she strode out through the double doors of the strange vessel, cries of death and terror drifting in her wake like an invisible cloud, ghastly and billowing.

Bainswick, the other Bainswick, the imposter Bainswick, the not-so perfect clone grown by the Luna Corporation, still in the same chamber as the Doctor, Sil and the buff and leather strapped guards, stared in amazement at the crystal pillar that housed the slugs. The one that had thrown itself against the tank, against the Doctor's touch, seemed to be changing shape, blossoming, trembling… The sheen of its watery skin shifting into something silvery…

Sil, enjoying a fresh, soothing spray of swamp water from his nearest servitor, licked his lips at the profit numbers spiraling across the monitor of his visiscreen. Bids from buyers were being placed for these worthless items, priceless in other time periods. The cheap cost of the installation of this kitsch base by the Luna Corporation, a small subcontracting firm, had been an added bonus.

In fairness, Sil could not know of the added features that the Luna Corporation, aside from their own subcontract with his own servitors about which Sil also knew nothing, were the freshly installed crystalline conduits that burrowed deep into the lunar soil, that pierced deep through the crust and down into the dead basaltic core of the planetoid, conduits that now throbbed and pulsed with antic, silver, light. If Sil had known, he'd probably have wanted in on the profits, in writing, which, in the right claws and with enough imagination, could be incalculable. After all, his antiques were about to become very valuable indeed.

For, like the tiniest wayward brush that causes the _Dionaea muscipula_ to clamp down upon its prey, the proximity of the Doctor to the slug caused a reaction a million years in the making, one that would make any Venus Flytrap green with envy.

The trap had been sprung.

Back on the Exhibition grounds, Ian could be forgiven for thinking that the moon had just become just a little bit brighter. A little bit closer.


	17. Teenage Wasteland

Hiding.

So many places to hide.

She was good at hiding.

She'd been hiding all her life. So much to hide from.

Slip between the leaves, glide underneath the shifting shadows, skim above the grasses, the tips of her wings stirring and trailing chaotic wakes, carving contrails of grassy beauty that spread out behind her as she flew.

The wind was her friend, once, when she'd rebelled, when she'd been other, a shapeshifter, high above the plains of Orubrial, soaring outside the dome of the Capitol, abandoning her training, evading her masters. They'd taught her how to change, to transform. She had no intention of going back.

Reckless, soaring. Different.

Free.

Darting, looping, diving, hiding from the Agents, easily dodging the careless bolts of the Castellan. In the end, however, she was no match for the gravity web. Nature vs Science, a foregone conclusion only on Gallifrey.

In the present, in the now, the creature that had been someone else, that had briefly been a flutterwing, that then became again an Agent and then again into this 'Susan', slammed a fist into a beefy man's left eye socket. All the while, statistics and probabilities coursed through her head; the physical act of fighting was automatic, senseless. Programming had been activated the moment she'd realized what was in the slugs, what was underneath their gentle murmurings, the trap that lay within. She didn't need to think anymore.

Unbidden, however, something, someone small and frightened, grabbed hold of that flighty memory, the fleeting sensation of freedom, that act of rebellion…

The Mentor guards were surprised by the appearance of the Tardis on the earthy podium. Surprised even more by her onslaught. Which was good. It gave time for Bainswick to slip out and kneel next to the dirt, to begin muttering the incantations that she'd taught him.

Surprise was also good for another reason. It took a fraction of a second too long for them call the alarm. Several of the guard tried to activate the panic switches embedded in their armour, but she was too fast for them. Her arms cut through the air with barely a whisper…

…Human-kind broke the sound barrier thousands of years before they even conceived of cheese-in-a-can, the small end of a whip cracking miniature sonic booms, first made long ago in ancient China...

She shook her head, sprinting through the corridors of the moon base, her black eyes flashing, appraising each door, each sound; the throbbing vibrations that she could only just register when stepping out of the Tardis, were already rattling the metal joints and rivets. Through the portals, she could see the Earthscape looming larger through the distorted glass, impossibly quickly. She mentally brought up the layout of the base in her head, reconstructing it from the complex reverberation of sound waves caused from the echo of her shoes lightly tapping the floor as she ran…

…Most toilets flush in E flat…

Susan stumbled slightly, her step skipping, the random thoughts slipping into her regimented-

…In the Phillippine jungle, the yo-yo was first used as a weapon…

…Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors…

…If everyone China lined up in front of you and you started walking past, you would never see the end due to their reproductive rate… would that be single file? Very flexible…

There used to be a 13th constellation in the Zodiac - Opheicus. But since 13 is unlucky, astrologers just ignored it-

STOP!

Stop. Stop it. She mentally slammed down invisible shutters, boxing in her thoughts, concentrating, shutting out the Susan that was trying to seep back in, with her distracting, useless, pointless thoughts that she'd no doubt picked out from those stupid humans.

Focus.

… Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated…

Focus.

… Stewardesses is the longest word that can be typed using only the left hand…

Focus- the Doctor has been in contact with the slugs, the genetic coding in their bodies will already have activated, engrams, engrams, the mutations will be too far advanced, the slugs-

… Slugs have four noses…

There were more guards, the central chamber, she'd reached the central chamber, she'd find him there-

.. Most lipstick contains fish scales…

She couldn't shut it out, couldn't silence the thoughts.

She ran at the guards, screaming a primal yell. But even that piercing battle cry couldn't block out the girl within.

She settled for pounding in the guards' faces instead.


	18. Interospa

It was amazing, somehow, how comfortable the interrogation table seemed to Barbara now.

And how much she didn't want to get up.

A historical hangover.

There were still so many aches, and memories, lingering in her head, sloshing about, that no matter how many times she tried to blink them away and return her focus back to the present, everything still seemed out of sorts, unreal.

Bainswick, for example, was leering over her, which, by this point, was at least familiar.

The sight of the other Bainswick, standing just behind him, was a little harder to take in.

For some reason, it seemed impolite to stare, but Barbara couldn't help herself. The other Bainswick, who was far larger, held a look in his eye that she couldn't quite place. And the nose… the nose seemed different somehow, as if it hadn't been broken as many times perhaps. Her Bainswick, even more puzzling, didn't seem to be aware of the second Bainswick creeping up behind him.

Barbara, unsure of exactly what was going on, settled for blinking a few more times.

Librarian. The thought struck her out of nowhere, much like the walking stick that swept down borne by GoodNoseBainswick's thick arms and slammed into the back of the unaware Bainswick's head. I just know, Barbara thought, librarians lead really quiet lives. No time traveling, no slug aliens, no grumpy old men who won't stop to ask for directions…

Somewhat distracted, she watched her Bainswick slump to the floor with groan and an ungainly thump.

Bainswick had been speaking, she realized now, his words, rapid fire and relentless, had showered down upon her as she'd been coming round, but she couldn't remember them, couldn't make sense of them and now he was… dead? Unconscious?

The strange ring on her finger itched.

The other Bainswick stood over her now, and said simply: "Chesterton asked me to look after you." He started undoing her restraints, and Barbara let out a long sigh of relief… Everything was going to be all ri-

She stopped herself just in time. She knew better by now than to finish that thought.

Meanwhile, back on Earth...

Ian had never seen it before.

The sound he had, it was true, echoing through the Ship as they traveled, but it was always distant, muffled…

Kneeling here in the dirt, the gritty, damp soil seeping into his trousers, and the moon swelling large above his head, Ian felt the air above his face whirl about, twisting in invisible, teasing gusts

And soundlessly, the Tardis appeared before him.

It arrived as gently as a sigh, but stood as tall and as solid as he remembered. The color of the paneling, a reassuring shade of blue, seemed exotic in this dark and wet night, out of place. And yet so welcoming a sight.

It seemed odd, somehow, to not hear the sound as it arrived. It seemed wrong.

And he wondered, not for the first time, that when the day came, when he and Barbara finally got home, if he would be relieved to hear the sound of the ship take off, stay behind and watch it fade away forever. Or if letting it go would be the greatest mistake of his life…

The moment hung long in the cold air between them, between man and Ship, unwilling companions, the moment awkward, yet also familiar.

Now is not the time.

The thought appeared in Ian's head, and he wondered, just for a second, if the thought was even really his own.

Ian pulled out the crumpled piece of paper from inside his jacket, stood up, dusted off as much of the dirt and muck that he could, and stepped into the Tardis.

The door swung shut behind him, leaving the field before the Crystal Palace in silence and darkness… except for the moon that loomed even larger overhead, it's normally pallid surface shading quietly into a gentle, amber, almost as if the night sky was tainted by a ground fire…

There was a strange wheezing, groaning sound, and the Tardis vanished once more.


	19. Rapture

Long ago…

The best stories always start with such a phrase, because unlike the future, the past has already happened. It is not unknown. Or at least, it should be known. Yet the lesson of growing up is that one will never truly know what really transpired, what really happened, in our past or anyone else's. Stories, like history, wear the cloak of Long Ago comfortably, luxuriating in the protection of nostalgia, loss and regret.

But not everyone has such limitations. Many races slip back and forth, in and out of history, punching holes, leaving behind threads and seams, and holes. Whether for war or for beauty, these forces return again and again, trying to remold, reform destinies; a patch here, a slice there… loose ends dangle and dwindle until its energy has burnt out...

Against such forces, traps were laid. A phrase in a book, a hidden black hole, a carefully positioned chair… some smaller than others, some laying dormant for eternity, never tripped, never activated. All had different goals. Some were warnings, some were last resorts, some lopped off the nose to spite the face… all protecting a certain path.

Spread across the Universe were a thousand nexus points, points where history was fixed, where things that needed to happen, would always happen, to ensure the future, a future with Gallifrey in it. Or one of them, anyway.

Embedded within the tiny minds of the slugs was an engram, an activation that could signal morphometric transformation change, and another to activate the lunar drive. While biology the wriggling forms within rebooted from scratch, reforming them for another purpose, the lunar systems, activated by the presence of the Timelord altered the course of the planetoid, sending it hurtling towards the Terra Nexus, carrying with it the primary target who, in this regeneration, had no idea who was trying to kill him.

After all, he'd never met them.

Yet.

XXXX

It was time.

Time to serve.

It was what he was built for.

As the guard watched, before the Doctor, the crystal edifice glowed internally, the twisting slug-like forms that swam within the liquid slush spasmed and writhed in ecstasy; silver skins skimming outward from where the Doctor had touched the surface, like an oil spill, it spread slick and quick.

The guard, who before the enslavement by the Mentors, had once had a name just like everyone else. But that name was long forgotten now, long abandoned since his upgrade by the Luna Corporation. Beneath the rippling, tanned flesh of his pectorals, something else flexed against the sinews, strained against the muscle. The sense of exhilaration, of relief, of pleasure thrilled through his body; he could see the ripple of activation spread throughout the other guards in the room. The look of bewilderment on Sil's face as his guards snapped to attention, flexing their very flesh upon the cold floor of the counsel room. The look of terror on the Doctor's face. Now you'll remember me…

Beneath his feet he could feel the planetoid shifting, the gravitational engines cycling up, pitch by pitch, abandoning the accoutrements of physics, like orbits and mass ratios.

Such things were for children.

Soon Earth would be destroyed and the timelines would be torn asunder, a spiderweb twisting before a hurricane.

It was rapture.

XXXX

"Is this a trick?!" Sil spat, his tiny claws poking at his monitors. "Timelord, you've tricked me… again?"

"Again?" the Doctor muttered, a slight smile edging into his stricken features. This has nothing to do with me, was something he didn't say. Not yet. Never look like you don't know what's going on. Not again…

Sil scanned the readouts, alarm plain to see on his green and waxy face. "Descending? Descending, how? How is this possible?"

"The orbit is fixed." The Doctor stated. For it was a fact, after all, had been for billions of years, and would remain so. The tone of his voice, however, betrayed his doubt.

"The orbit is not decaying," Sil screeched. "We are simply descending. Directly. That is fact." His arms began to flail in panic. "Guards, carry me. We must leave, at once!"

But the guards ignored his orders, ignored his commands. They were busy. Their flesh was slipping off their frame to splatter upon the floor like hot fat on a skillet.

The Doctor stepped away from them in shock, unconsciously stepping closer to Sil. The two of them suddenly had so much more in common…

And then there was a vicious CRACK

And the crystalline column in the centre of the room had fractured open, spraying out sludgy fluid like pus squeezed from a wound.

Carried by a hundred tiny segmented legs, a silver creature crawled out. Its tendrils quivered in the air, as if searching for a scent.

Then, with a casual flick of its hind legs, it launched itself towards the Doctor's throat.

XXXX

It was like having her face thrust through a waterfall: shocking, abrasive, cleansing. Images fell across her eyes as if they were left over from dream, transparent, fleeting, easily forgotten. Syllables dribbled into her ears, foreign, alien, slipping into her head.

Falling through space.

Stars. Blackness. The sun, its white light brighter than anything she'd ever known. A darkened sky. London.

Earth.

Barbara was kneeling in dirt. Bainswick lay by her side. The Crystal Palace loomed above her. The moon loomed impossibly bright above her, so unreal it must be a trick, a projection, a painting. It can't be…

It was then that the moon moved so close that it escaped the light of the sun, and revealed itself to the world as it truly was, without the blessing of distance and solar affection. The planetoid burned bright over the tiny village of London, its surface burning red, the face of the man in the moon replaced by a smouldering sneer of a devil. The sky itself above her head seemed to boil, the clouds rippling, curling in on themselves before fleeing, skirting the atmosphere, racing away towards the cool shelter of the poles.

Barbara braced herself, as if to run, to sprint away from the impossible collision of the world above her head with the one beneath her feet, but even as she tensed, she felt the familiar embrace of Ian's arms upon hers, and saw the familiar form of the Tardis, which she swore hadn't been there a moment before, on the grass under the shelter of a tree, waiting patiently…

She wanted to cry out, to tell him about the Doctor, about the moon base, about her battle, about home, about her sister, about why wouldn't he kiss her, after all that they'd been through, why was a kiss so impossible, as if they were being prevented, interfered with, about how she was so sick of her students, but only because she wanted a child of her own, one that she would raise it right so it wasn't like all the rest and theworldiscollapsingandi'mhaving-thesestupidselfishthoughts. She wanted to tell him so many, many, many things, but there was no air any more in the space between them, even though their heads were pressed together.

It was all wrong. So impossibly wrong.

Why was it that she'd been given a chance to do

something, to make things better; after so many terrible things had happened, if she couldn't do anything with them, what was the point?

And if she loved history, if she could feel it burn in her veins, why now did it feel like it was slipping away from her, like a flood sinking into the dry desert sands, to vanish without a trace.

As if her life had never happened.

There was no air around them, only screaming as the atmosphere boiled away and the buildings rocked and buckled, shattering glass and steel and brick. The crust beneath her heaved and shook.

XXXX

The silver insect froze in mid leap, inches away from the Doctor's neck.

"What on earth is that?" The Doctor leaned closer to it, curiosity over coming fear, as always.

"Don't touch it." The voice seemed to shout, although it was barely a whisper.

The Doctor glanced at the doorway in irritation. His gaze was arrested then, as if he'd slipped suddenly into shock.

There in the doorway, her body drenched in blood, was Susan.

Or what had been Susan.

She was staring at the creature, fixated, as if her undivided attention was the only thing keeping it in mid air.

"Do not touch it. It's a Cybermat."

That was when the guards slipped out of the rest of their skin, revealed their implants and superhuman silver skeletons and threw themselves at her.


	20. Rage Against the Dying of the Night

The moon above was a raging fireball, stretching from horizon to horizon, so close that Ian could feel the weight of it pressing, smothering him. He pressed his eyes tight shut and tried not to scream.

What had been the roar of rushing atmospherics had cycled up above his hearing; all that reached him now was a throbbing pulse, the graviton waves thudding through his skull. A thousand, million timelines crying out in pain as they were cut off from this moment, from this anchor, sliced off and cast away to drift into eternity.

His senses were being bombarded by pressures and possibilities that his body had not been designed for, yet the one thing that stood out, the one thing that made him realize that he was still alive was the weight of Barbara in his arms, her hands clutching into his back, the brush of her long, gusting hair against the bare skin of his neck.

There was so much he wanted to say.

But, like so often in his travels in the Tardis, there was so much else happening in that single moment that it felt as if time itself were about to burst.

He couldn't tell her that the simple hop of shifting the Tardis two hundred yards to the left, off the patch of soil where she just appeared, had taken months of his own life. Even the instructions given to him by Susan the Destroyer (or so he had mentally dubbed her) had not been enough to tame the Ship's impetuous, bucking nature.

Ian had spent the past six months trying to return to this point, this shattered place in time. So fragile was this moment, it was like trying to land an aircraft carrier upon an invisible plane of fractured glass. He'd never be able to tell her of being stranded in the second Messenian War against Sparta, of the destruction of Babylon by the Assyrians or escaping the Nika Revolt in Constantinople. Or about the Pharos lighthouse that was actually a dying Tardis in disguise or the strange woman who lived within it that had hunted him.

What mattered was that he'd made it here, landed the Ship, although by this timethe Tardis limping, sluggish, as if unwilling to arrive. Every time he entered the commands upon the strange and implausible controls, Ian was such at a loss as to what he was doing that he literally crossed his fingers each time before pressing the final switch. As for the other commands...

It didn't matter.

He was here. At last, he was here. At the world's end.

To die with Barbara.

If she knew that he'd come back to this point knowing it was suicide, she'd probably kill him.

But Ian, after all this time, had become a fan of irony. If the choice was to laugh or cry, he'd made his choice long ago.

Or perhaps he had a little faith in Susan after all.

As Ian watched the moon above him about to collide with Earth, he knew it didn't matter, not really. His life, so fleeting, so silly, didn't matter. Nothing did, if you stop to think about it. Which was what he learnt during those six months.

All that mattered was that he wanted to come back home.

And he had.

He pressed his face against Barbara's and prayed.

XXX

Susan needed just a little more time.

Around her, she could feel the moon base begin to fall apart.

Within her, she could feel her Susan self struggling, about to break apart.

The Cybermat, still trapped in mid-air inches from the Doctor's neck, squirmed within her mental grip. It was not a model she'd ever seen before. It must be some advanced offshoot outside of Gallifreyan knowledge, from a future not yet glimpsed by the matrix. Time active, venomous, and if the guards around her were anything to judge by, capable of converting its prey. Its segmented legs twitched and spasmed against her hold. Although devoid of all emotion, like the rest of the CyberHorde, she could feel its anger at being denied its prey. So close, so near.

It was all happening too fast, too fasttoofast. The Susan within had distracted her too long: the guards, while not fully converted, were already advancing on her. Ian had obviously failed and the moon itself had reached an unstoppable point in its descent, it was all going horribly, horribly wrong.

She felt the guards fierce grip on her arms, ruining her concentration.

Seizing the moment, the cybermat flicked round in the air and threw itself at her.

She just needed a little more time.

XXX

Ian's eyes were shut, so he missed the first signs.

There were many things Ian, as a follower of 1960's science, couldn't have known. He couldn't have known for instance, that four billion years ago, when the Earth was still being formed, still a swirling mass of molten rock, that another, smaller world the size of Mars had slammed into the sloshing mass, ripping out unimaginable tones of molten rock, flinging them out into space, and yet not far enough to escape... Cooling, circling, and perpetually trying to escape, the globule became caught by Earth's gravitation pull, tethered unwillingly into a seemingly eternal orbit.

Until today, where it soared back towards Earth once more, slamming down like a sledgehammer out of the sky. The nightmare of the God's made real.

Ian was aware, fleetingly, of something hard and cool slipping under his head, his back, his legs, something running across the ground, between him and the soil…

The familiar sound, unhearable in these impossible conditions still wheezed and groaned; the tiny flashing light swamped by the raging fire that was the sky, where there was no sky, but the little lamp atop the blue box still flashed frantically anyway, as if in warning or perhaps in panic.

Not quite knowing why, or perhaps it was the familiar sensation against his skin or perhaps as a result of some subconscious connection, Ian opened his eye for a final look.

What he saw was completely impossible.

Utterly ridiculous.

The base of the Tardis had sloped outward, spreading, no… leaked, leaked was the only word he could think of. As if it had spilled paint across the ground, everywhere he looked the earth was covered in a coating of blue. Before he could conjecture whether it was armor or perhaps the blood of a time ship, the box itself grew longer, taller. Slowly at first, then faster and taller and faster and longer and wider and longer and faster and faster the Ship sprouted up from the ground and launched itself, still tethered to the Earth at its base, towards the massive planetoid above.

Ian blinked.

The Tardis was going to ram the moon head on.

"Oh," Ian never said, because there was no sound, "Shit."


	21. Grimm Luck

Nighttime was his favorite time.

Sometimes, as a child, when the thunderous snoring of his brothers was too much to abide, Colvin would crawl out through the window and spread his blanket upon the roof tiles, cold and gritty, and lie on his back, watching the stars arc across the sky before they slipped lazily beneath the horizon.

It was soothing, the simple pleasure of it: the quiet, the calm, the gentle breath of the night breeze… so different than everything else in his world.

Little Colvin looked up into the sky, eyes ablaze with starlight and wonder: and fell asleep, his breathing soft, drool streaking down his chin.

He could have stayed in his little village for his entire life. He could have taken over his uncle's pottery. He could have lived a quite life, and perhaps 'done the right thing'…

It would be easier, perhaps, to say that something terrible happened in his childhood, that his brothers went off to war, or his parents were cruel, or killed, or, or, or, or…

But unlike the tales of old would have us believe, not everyone's childhood is terrible. That doesn't make them any less interesting. Sometimes there isn't an easy excuse for why people choose their path, however wrong it may end up being.

If anything, it's people who have awful childhoods who turn out to be the nicest, kindest, of people… because they've already seen the worst of us, the monsters within.

It's everyone else you need to worry about.

Colvin had volunteered to join the Cadre, trained to serve the Mentors. Fought for the Mentors. Watched his friends die for the Mentors.

He'd done it all willingly. Proudly. Traveled throughout the galaxies and even, on this assignment, across Time itself. The pay wasn't bad either.

He wasn't mad about the outfits though.

Ironically, it was disillusionment in their all-for-profit ways that sent him astray, that sent him wandering from the barracks while off-world during an audit of Fury-161 that he came across the agent… knowing nothing of their history, of their battle across the stars, he knew nothing of jug handles or a thousand other permutations: the agents were an off-shoot, steathly, sheathed in blood and soft, soft flesh.

When he woke the next morning, he listened to her offer.

It would be easier to say that she'd implanted him with a control device, easier to say that he was drugged when he made his choice, was not sane when he chose the insane. When he held out his arm for the silver creature to bite, he did it willingly.

He'd simply accepted because it sounded _interesting_.

The choice had been his.

Now, in the moon base hurtling towards Earth, he stared at the magnificent creature that burst into the room, that contained the cyber-roach with simple the power of her thoughts and he marveled. The enhanced strength he possessed, the endurance, the implants, even the graviton drive he'd helped install… they seemed so… so much like accessories in comparison.

This tiny woman had power.

For the first time, it occurred to Colvin he might have chosen the wrong side.

It was in that moment, however, that the implants took complete control, overriding his thoughts, his emotions, his decisions.

He blinked.

When his eyes opened, they were ablaze for the first time since childhood, lit by diodes and photo cells-anything but wonder.

When his flesh fell away and slid to the floor, the name Colvin went with it.


	22. Imminent

Susan staggered backwards, clawing at the creature that was clawing at her neck.

She twisted as she fell back, though; legs angled wide, elbows out, her limbs striking into the guards as they rushed her.

She slammed into the floor, her skull bouncing upon the hard, dull metal with a horrible bong.

As if it were merely a slap across the face, Susan didn't even flinch. It was enough, however, just enough, for her to regain focus. With a concentrated, vile bark of revulsion, her mind slapped the creature away where it skittered and slid amongst the darkness of the shadowy crystal pillars.

It was only then, as Susan grabbed a flailing Mentor arm to pull herself up- before she twisted it behind his back and snapped it in half- that she saw that the other pillars littered throughout the room were all starting to splinter and crack… the slithering, twisting contents were lashing against the fractured surfaces, desperate to get out, desperate to be free.

There were seven guards in total: two were on the floor, one cradling his now deformed arm and the other on his knees, tentative fingers probing the wet spaces where his eyeballs had once been. Their conversion was still in process then: they still felt pain.

One grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms. She leant back against him, her legs in the air once more, scything into necks, abdomens and with a final flourish, rammed both feet into a crotch. She threw the guard off with a backwards psychic blast and landed on all fours like a cat.

Above her, inset into the chamber ceiling where once had been only been velvety blackness, orange fire flickered and raged against the thick glass.

Collision was imminent.

She hadn't counted on the stricken guard doubling over quite so quickly, falling backwards, nor the random, unintentional kick from his flailing boot that struck her across the face, dropping her onto the ground in an undignified heap.

Her cheek was pressed against the floor, her lungs clutched at air that was not there: winded, all she could do was gasp and claw at the floor, trying to breathe again.

It was all they needed. She registered a blow to her thigh, and an instant later realized it was the thrust of a knife sliding deep into her flesh. The remaining guards piled onto her, hundreds of pounds of shiny sinew and glistening metal. And from across the floor the creature sped toward her, towards her face, open and exposed.

What happened to Ian? What happened to the Tardis? She screamed mentally when she should have been refocusing on the creature, on blotting out the pain, of keeping both at bay of-

The creature was on her.

There was a snap.

Susan was able to jerk her head backwards and saw the Doctor her grandfather, a voice inside her cried standing above her, his cane pinning the creature to the floor. The old man was wearing a peculiar expression, one of puzzlement, of fear, and perhaps, amusement that he'd managed to subdue the silver creature that writhed and hissed beneath the metal cap of his walking stick.

But then one of the guards leapt on the old Timelord, dashing him to the floor with a single gauntleted blow.

All hell broke loose.


	23. Rupture

A mere few hundred yards away from the huddled forms of Ian and Barbara, the blue fountain that was the Tardis roared, seemingly out of the very Earth itself, up, up, up, into the sky, thundering like a gushing, raging volcano, striking up through the reddened sky towards the moon.

Flirtatious.

Whimsical.

Tenderly.

Amorphous.

Such are Timeships of the Gallifreyans born: teased from the very matter around us, from within the heart of stars, gathered from the mists of auroras, from the depths of handbags. Particles pulled from randomness, from nothingness, shaped by mathematics and breathed into life by the throbbing pulse of radiation from a tortured black hole.

As exotic as the particles that were harnessed to create it are, as strange and alien as its life was, it still had instinct. It still rebelled from the orders that the faux-Susan gave it, forcing the time agent to send it to Ian via the transmit; it still dallied and dithered around in Earth's history, reluctant to return to the point Susan commanded, demanded with protocols sewn into the Timeship's very being from the Dark Times of Rassilon. The Tardis was primed and obedient, but reluctantly so.

Even then, an observer would be hard pressed to realize this, for just as the two worlds, one blue and white, the other pitted furnace red, were about to kiss together in a fatal embrace, a thin, twisting spear of blue shot up from Earth's surface and slammed like the fist of a God into the surface of the moon.

Dust clouds the size of Australia billowed upward from the point of impact, spreading by the gravity wave, fragments streaking down onto Earth, a shower of fiery rain filling an already impossible sky.

The Moon paused in its descent, as if reconsidering its kamikaze path.

The Tardis kept pushing, kept burrowing into the massive crater it had created. Twisting, deeper, deeper into the lunar crust.

Then, as most of the dust were blown away by the gust of an invisible sigh, the moon continued its descent, plummeting towards Earth. It seemed to increase its speed as it impaled itself on the slender blue thread that was the sword of the Tardis.

For deep within its heart, the graviton engines shifted a gear, revving up past the maximum limits.

Just as the lunar wounds bled fresh, red basaltic blood into what was left of Earth's atmosphere, history was being ripped asunder, scattering possibilities into the ether.

The Timeship sent a belated distress call out to all of the probable existant Gallifreys for help, but there was no answer to its call. The Tardis kept pushing and burrowing, but the situation was already past the point of no return.


	24. Luna Fugit

The shockwave slammed into the base, scattering its inhabitants into the walls, the ceilings, each other-

Susan felt as if her mind had exploded with it, smashing her vision, creating tumultuous, microsecond scenes, as she was rolled, thrown,

explosions, there were explosions, the lighting, the gravity, both systems convulsed, spasamed;

flashes-

everything was flashes:

the guards, the guards were on her, grotesque, their limbs still slick with black blood and dripping with remnants of forgotten organs, they still held their grip, still held her down, their empty, gaping red eye sockets staring at her, leering,

then they were floating, everyone was floating and twisting and yelling, while globules of fluid drifting peacefully between them,

then gravity flashed in again and they all piled together in a savagely tumultuous wreck, heaving and bucking as they slammed into the ground, and she was down again, down, her mind still fractured, her body still recovering, pinned down, breathless, helpless, and then they heard it, they all heard it, the cracking, the splintering as the crystalline cases finally ruptured, causing them all to turn as one and stare as the cybermats broke free and spurted across the floor towards them, impossibly quick, like a thousand gobs of liquid mercury rushing for them, their tiny legs moving so fast as to seem invisible, racing towards them, and Susan wanted to scream, if she could breathe, if she had air, if she-

a second impact, and she was free, the brown flash of Bainswick's wide form broad-siding the cyberthugs, slamming them against the wall, and for a fraction of a second, just for a fraction of a second, Susan could breathe-

TTT

Ian was screaming, sliding, screaming, he didn't know he could scream, didn't know that it was him screaming, because there was so many other sounds- the sound of the Tardis spewing upwards was so loud that it didn't register because until now there was no sound, because there had been no air, but now he and Barbara were sliding, spinning down a ramp of blue, away from the massive structure that had been the ship, wind rushing around them as they slid away down on a smooth carpet of bloc-transfer mathematics, while behind them the ship speared even further upwards, licked by lightening as it pierced the sky, the moon, the future as the horizons pressed together threatening to squeeze the life out of them, out of everything, and the ground, London, was rushing up to meet them as they slid faster and faster, Barbara's fingers clawing into his skin as they clung together, fighting against the centripetal forces, screaming together as they raced towards the ground-

TTT

Susan exhaled-

-and drew focus-

the tide of ravenous metallic creatures swept against her, around her over her, over them, around all of them, hissing and seething and raging against an invisible barrier, a bubble, a force bubble that she was projecting, projecting as the world around her began to fell apart, as the base around all of them began to quake and shake itself to pieces- hold, hold the moment, hold the moment…

and then it was gone and the creatures slipped through the barrier as it collapsed, the creatures scattering onto the ground and then she was running, sprinting, out of the chamber and down through the hallways, the raucous hiss of the thousands of tiny legs tapping against the floor behind her was like the spatter of a rainstorm chasing her: acid rain and silver spewing poison and death… faster, just keep running, faster and faster, just make it to the soil transmitter, just keep running and then the base shook and the popping rush of escaping atmosphere embraced her and she knew she wasn't going to make it, she wasn't going to make it, instinct made her twist, instinct saved her, and she was turning, lunging, grabbing the creature as it flew towards her before it could bite, and she fell backwards, desperately reaching for the shiny brass switch-

TTT

A single moment, it was just a pause, as if this impossible hell seemed to relax for a moment, just a moment and Bainswick stared in awe at this litte girl and this impossible invisible wall that was all that separated them all from this repulsive tsunami of metallic death- Bainswick didn't hesitate, wrenching himself away from the demonic men and grabbing the old man, the Doctor, grabbed him bodily, bore him away from his granddaughter, the old man was screaming, pounding against Bainswick's chest, but Bainswicks' cry was louder:

_GoGoGoGoGoGOGOGGOGOGOGOGO!_

Sprinting, he was sprinting now, racing through the complex, back to where he'd taken Barbara, through the twisting, protesting metal that screamed in agony as the rivets popped and the glass shattered, and Bainswick staggered into the travel room, tossing the frail old man into an undignified heap into the damp soil, and the words dribbled out of Bainswicks' mouth, unfamiliar and thick in his mouth, choking on the alien syllables- there was a flash of green, a grotesque sight of something crawling towards him, wet and slithering-

TTT

Barbara was screaming, but not screaming, as there was no air left in her lungs, yet her throat and lungs strained as if they could scream, as if anyone could hear, as if they could do anything, as underneath her the Tardis seemed to have pulled itself out of the ground like a massive tree trunk, a mythical bean stalk, growing and growing, wider and wider, and she and Ian slid further and faster and she wanted to be sick, she wanted to close her eyes, but it was too impossible, it was too surreal, and everything flashing across her vision was impossible and she saw it, saw the massive bulge, as if the Tardis were a massive snake swallowing an enormous meal, she saw the bulge, the impact from slamming into the moon, propagating towards them, a massive, impossible wave of blue that swelled up into the sky towards them, racing down at them, and they were still falling, still sliding, but it wasn't going to be fast enough, they weren't going fast enough it was going to reach them and Barbara screamed and prayed to go fasterfasterfasterfasterFAAASSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTERRRR

And beneath her, above her and beyond her, the probing pinnacle of theTardis, impaled within the descending moon, driving deeper and deeper into the depths of the moon, finally reached the ion drives in the planetoid's center and with a casual tail flick of basic mathematics, jettisoned the very tip of its long blue form-

and converted matter to energy.

TTT

_GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF, GETITOFFGETITOFF!!!!_

Susan was screaming, twitching, kicking, shuddering and running, revolted at the pinching, barbed touch of the hundreds of tiny metal legs as the creature crawled up the small of her back and across her stomach, its slithering silver hide crackling as it slid across her body. The base around her was collapsing around her in a searing blaze of molten metal and screaming girders, the roaring explosions tenderly laced with a telltale deathly hiss as the precious air around her boiled off into the vacuum of space. She fell upon the release switch of the escape hatch with such force, for a moment she thought she'd driven her arm straight into the steel wall. There was a savage sigh as the capsule door tore itself open, and she fell inside, frantically trying to rip off the creature that had now crawled across her stomach, burrowing beneath her clothing and scuttling up between her breasts.

She didn't feel the pain as she landed on her back, didn't feel the wind get knocked out of her lungs, didn't hear her own screams dissolve into invisible, silent gasps because her own mind was deafened by her own mental cries driven by an impossible revulsion, crying to get this thing off, get this horrible, wretched thing off, get it off, GET IT OFF, _GET IT OFF, GETITOFFGETITOFF!!!!_

The creature used four segmented limbs to lift its slathering mouth up out of her shirt, placing each of its delicate, silver insectoid hind legs upon her chin in order to levering itself upward, while its cold, heavy tail twitched between the bare skin of her breasts. Susan grasped its head between her shuddering fists, her sweaty flesh slipping across the alien surface that gleamed with an oily sheen, her nails bending and snapping against its impenetrable carapace; the creatures multi faceted eyes reflected nothing but her terror, her own gaping eyes and bared teeth. She was only dimly aware that the door had cycled shut or the muffled jolt as the capsule ejected off the surface and into the calming depths of space.

It was just her now: just her and this hideous creature.

The bug placed four slim feelers at the corners of her mouth and slowly pulled back the soft, giving flesh of her lips.

Barabara. She cried out for Barbara, even though she knew the schoolteacher was back on the base, the base she'd left behind, the base that was busy vomiting its contents of fuel, fire, water, air and people into the back void of space.

The Doctor, they'd come so close. Everything had been going so well. They'd had plan, an actual Plan for once, and they were so close, everything was so close…

The creature's mouth opened further, revealing two mandibles that clicked and snapped, before setting their tips into the tiny gap between her teeth. Susan bit down another scream, fighting against the urge, desperate to keep her mouth shut, to try to keep her teeth together as the creature's impossible strength prised open her jaw.

From within the mouth of the giant silverfish, two wet, maggoty tendrils appeared, layered with dripping mucus, slowly scraping across her teeth and along her gagging tongue. Susan screwed her eyes up, and screamed for all she was worth, and in a last desperate urge to fight back, tried to slam her teeth shut, trying to cut off the horrible tendrils, but the pincers anticipated this, holding her jaw firm, as it forced itself into her choking mouth and down into her throat.

Susan tried to scream, tried to be ill, tried to cough, tried to breath, tried to kick, tried to punch, but the sharp pain that stabbed up into the back of her mouth and into her head filled her mind with white, and her body became suddenly still.

There was a tiny portal above her head, but her slack, dead eyes didn't even register when the moon silently exploded.


	25. Closure

**Cybermats 101**

Cybermat combat systems were initiated experiments during the initial conversion of Mondas, whose inhabitants did not all go quietly.

Mondasian insect pupae were injected with cyber micro-systems that developed as the insect progressed through its larval and final insectoid stage. Initial tests on scorpions and similar arachnae specimens proved successful. Later experiments specialized in air-borne and space-borne insects. The final cyboid was could then be controlled for purposed of infiltration, information and, when fitted with the correct nanites, could infect and convert the local populations. Aquatic cyboids were similarly injected to patrol the Mondasian oceans.

Later designs were more specialized for different campaigns: some no longer utilized a biological host and were purely mechanical, often resembling silverfish or much larger, snake-like entities, to increase mobility and remain undetected from bio sensors while infesting enemy bio-craft and installations.

In the final stages of one of the later time wars, the cybermats, these resembling fluid shifting worms, were able to tap into extra-dimensional pockets of subspace to house their quantum flight engines and staged time active, devastating attacks, riddling entire planets to rubble.

Several other experiments remained scattered throughout time and space, some failed, some abandoned, others intentionally left behind by various now-extinct races of the cyberhorde...

The cybermat now extruding its tentacles into Susan's pons, medulla, and cerebellum had originally been injected into the DNA of a _Agriolimacidae Deroceras _indigenous to a small, third moon of a gas giant in the Vinda-K system, several millennia earlier. It had harnessed the magnesium-aluminum rich nutrient mix present in the crystalline fluid, like the other thousand creatures that recently swarmed the moonbase. Susan's proximity, and that of the other older humanoid, had triggered a different response other than outright conversion/kill instinct that dominated the cybermat instinctual subroutines:

Infiltrate.

It began to download the information in the Susan system and broadcast it on a special frequency, reserved to reach whatever cyberhorde existed in this reality.

Its tendrils sparked and sizzled the pink-gray flesh as it devoured the flashes that flashed from dendrite to dendrite.

It hummed, apparently quite happily, away as it burrowed further into Susan's brain, its reserves systems powering up to fry the organisms brain pan when the down load was complete.

XXX

Everything was white.

It made everything so much easier.

Her name, before it had been Susan, was lost to her. Her childhood was nothing more than an angry smear now, red, purple bruises that tasted of bitterness and loss.

It didn't matter now.

History was unraveling, weeping through the seams. Not entirely torn asunder, not yet. Probabilities and infinities were unwinding, resolving.

There was still enough time, in this frozen moment that stretched before her, to end this distraction permanently, to continue with the rest of the mission.

Why she should pursue the mission, why she should continue to carry out orders, was beyond her at this point: she was a broken, half-reconstituted psyche, occupying a dying host, even if it was a future incarnation. Certainties were there to hold on to… there was little else. Survival was all that mattered.

There was her prey, she could see Susan: a vaporous trail, a dashing, ghostly streak- draining as it sped away. They were both draining away. The moment was being sucked away from both of them. There was no time.

She changed the landscape in a moment, made a sky of blue, an earth of brown and black. Susan stood out against the background immediately: a terrified ball of bright white, skimming across the surface.

She took flight, diving towards Susan, forming talons and massive wings as she dove, a falcon diving down towards the tiny, white wisp.

Susan, startled, flitted across the terrain, managing to grow hasty, quick, tiny wings of her own, flying just above the ground, lashing from left to right, trying to evade the massive creature that bore down on her.

She struck at Susan, her first blow glanced through the half-formed wing, causing her to wheel to the left, to stagger through the skies, to fall into a canyon. She swooped down after her, but the injury caused Susan's slight form to twitch and veer in unexpected patterns. She wheeled, rounding to dive again, soaring through the imaginary air, taking in the sky that reached above and beyond her: it too was smeared, dripping, dripping with numbers and images, memories and scents, fears and dreams- leaking, draining away.

There she was- herself, not Susan, but as a woman, tall, confident, glancing at her reflection as she strode through the Capitol. There she was again, a fugitive, staring at her image in a murky and muddled puddle.

From out of the sky, like a drop of rain, a memory struck her, splashing across her brown wings and gaunt head.

Putyaskiatrelawnduthuna.

Putya had been her name. Once. One of them.

She had been Putya.

The knowledge thrilled her, filled her, drove her, and she wheeled once more in the sky, invigorated… she needed to survive, to become Putya again.

Down towards Susan she dove once more.

XXX

The escape capsule, riding the bow wave of the explosion, drifted down towards Earth, quietly skimming the stratosphere in blazing, fiery skips and hops.

Around it, debris and meteorites burnt and streaked across the skies of Earth.

The Tardis, rebounding like elastic, snapped downwards towards the ground once more, twitching away from the central explosion, its plasmic shell writhing in agony.

Around it, shuddering and shifting in ways visible only to it, history and infinity writhed and flinched, distorted, merging…

Changing.

XXX

Putya angled and swooped, snapping at Susan's tail feathers as she slipped in and out of the slot canyons, nimbly darting down into the impossibly sculpted landscape, riding hidden currents that gusted and whispered through the narrow passageways while Putya soared from above, worriedly.

She hadn't created those canyons, the slim and deep passages. Susan was learning, adapting the landscape.

There wasn't time for this.

Around them both, above and below, the mirage was fading, shifting, the colors diluted, as someone were immersing the image in silty, settling water, washing their existence away.

There wasn't time for any of this.

With a concentrated effort, Putya blasted the ground out of existence, swatting Susan's frail form onto a mesa, the only surface left, and talons flexed, she pounced.

XXX

As the ground rushed up to meet Barbara, she heard a familiar sound: the Tardis door opening- and then she was sliding, still sliding, but slowing as the console flashed past and the control room wall grabbed her, held her gently, held Ian too in its cushioned embrace.

Sliding into the Tardis, she'd been holding onto Ian tightly, desperately; now that they were inside the Ship again, though, her arms dropped away, as if forgetting why she'd held him. The emotions for him that had swamped her just seconds before fell to the floor between them, forgotten too.

If she were aware of it, she'd have noticed the same thing happening to Ian too.

Disbelieving, they help each other to their feet and stared around the empty room: it was a mess. Furniture, clothes and equipment were scattered and smashed. The normally pure, white walls glowed an unhealthy orange and brown.

Noticing that the doors were still open, and that some semblance of normality appeared to have been restored, they moved to the door and stepped outside.

Together, they marveled in awe and horror at the world that greeted them.

XXX

Putya had Susan pinned to the ground, both claws embedded deeply into Susan's slight wings.

Around them, the world began to dissolve as the cybermat's impulses continued to obliterate and drain their collective mind.

"Be still," she said, her voice quiet, controlled. "It's almost time. It will all be over."

"We'll both be dead." Susan's tiny eyes were wide with panic.

"Death," Putya answered, "is a lot like Life… it's different for everyone."

XXX

Above Ian and Barbara, the sky was a chaotic mess.

The moon was gone.

The thought lodged in Ian's head, too massive, too stunning, to sink in. Like the death of a family member, it was beyond comprehension.

It was shock. It was grief.

The growing morning light and the fading darkness were phantoms, overwhelmed by the rain of fire and the thick streak that stretched from horizon to horizon, from east to west.

"Rings!" A familiar voice grunted. "Rings… Earth's rings… well then. Well then. Unexpected… impossible of course. But still, unexpected." The Doctor was walking towards them across the muddied grounds; in the background behind him the crystal palace was a twisted shattered ruin. Ian turned to look at the Tardis… it looked like a candle that had been set in the sun: the fine lines and sharp corners of the police box were soft and molten, still shifting back into shape. The Doctor came to stand by them, running a hand over his wounded ship, before staring with them back up at the sky once more.

"I don't believe it…" Ian shook his head.

"No… I'm not sure I do either."

"Doctor…" Ian began gingerly. "What about… what happened… where's Susan?"

The Doctor was silent. The silence dragged on, filled the space between them as they stared on the cool, ruptured earth, the weight of it threatening to smother them all.

"Doctor," Barbara placed a cautious hand on the old man's arm. "Bainswick… was he, did he?"

"I'm sorry my dear… he got me out, but there wasn't time. He didn't make it back."

From the sorrowful tone of the Doctor's voice, Ian guessed that somehow the Doctor had known that it was a different man who'd saved him.

"The other," Barbara began, "the copy, he… we lost him in all of…" she threw her hands up around her as if to say, in all this, then hugged herself with them instead. "A conman, a killer, a rapist and a thief… and we let him get away. Still… he gets caught, ten years from now…"

"Bainswick?" Ian frowned, as if having trouble with the description.

Barbara grew quiet, thinking of all the lives that they'd have saved if they'd stopped him, but that would have meant-

"Will he? Will he my dear?" The Doctor pointed a finger upwards and waggled it angrily. "Nothing, I think, nothing, will be the same any more. Nothing!"

XXX

Susan felt her terror draining away. The creature was draining even that emotion away.

As her fear subsided, her mind, or what was left of it, cleared. She stared at the bird, no, the woman holding her down, who had worn her face, who had worn her body, who had done such horrible things, how had killed all those thousands of helpless, infected creatures in the factory, who had killed all of those guards, this woman who was her, but a person she could never imagine being. Staring deeper, she saw all of the woman's many faces, fragments of her past, her knowledge, her history.

And she understood why this woman was waiting, why she hadn't finished her off: the cybermat would not detach until the body was dead.

Which, when you think about it, is different. For different people.

And Susan was a very different person.

And very, very, very cross.

She might not be the first Susan, she might not even be the best Susan, but this was her incarnation, her body and by hell she wasn't going to give it up without a fight.

Susan sneered, then rammed Coal Hill School down Putya's throat: imagined every brick, every desk, every school lunch, every depressed teacher, every bitchy teen, every angry word she threw at this woman who was holding her down. Slapping Putya across the face with Skaro and a thousand Aztec warriors, Susan leapt up and kicked the woman in the stomach, and pressed her foot into her neck, staring down at the look of shock and confusion in the woman's face.

Beneath them both, the mesa faded away.

Susan raised an eyebrow, but her voice was full of sorrow. "Time to die."

And then Putya was gone. Then Susan was gone too.

And in a rattling, rolling escape capsule that was plummeting to Earth, the cybermat flashed a lethal electrical charge across her brain pan and Susan died.

The cybermat detached its tentacles and curled up into a little ball and shut itself off.

XXX

Ian spun around in alarm: it was the sound.

The light atop the Tardis was flashing. The Ship was leaving.

"Quickly!" The Doctor leapt through the closing doors and Ian, grabbing Barbara, raced in quickly behind him, terrified the Doctor would leave them in his haste. Breathless, they stumbled to a stop against the console and watched the rotor groan up and down, juddering and wheezing in protest.

"Who…" Barbara gasped between breaths. "Is… flying…. the… Ship?"

Again, the Doctor didn't answer, flicking switches instead before he started punching buttons. He walked round and round the console, each flick and punch becoming angrier, more violent. Finally, he gave up and watched in silence, sucking a bruised finger, and studying the rotor as it continued its perpetual beat.

So focused on the disgruntled old man, Ian never saw it appear; he just stumbled against it when he took an uncomfortable step backwards.

There was a tinny, clanging sound. And the smell of burnt ozone.

Doctor- he meant to say. But couldn't. Because he'd seen what was inside the capsule. Could see Susan's dead expression, her bloodied neck at an awkward angle.

Ian didn't know what to say.

XXX

Barbara flinched. She'd been leaning against the console, and her hand had itched oddly. She stared at her bare fingers, trying to remember something. There was a soft, muted clanking sound, as if something had fallen into the console. She stared at her hands again, but just couldn't quite-

It was then that she saw Ian trip, saw the capsule sitting impossibly behind him. Saw him gaping through the portal. Saw the Doctor rushing over to it, clamoring at the door, shouting, saw Ian moving to help him, watched them try to pry open the door, tried to open the capsule. Barbara walked slowly over to the burnt and battered shell herself, and gathered her stomach which seemed to be lurching and heaving, and, placing her hands against the still-warm glass she stared inside.

Susan… it was Susan… and she was… was she? Barbara couldn't quite work it out, couldn't quite see… it had looked… it looked as if the girl's skin… were… as if her skin was glowing.

Barbara blinked, and then stared again. No… Susan looked… she looked fine. There were no marks on her neck either. She looked… she looked fine. Perfect.

There was a clank as the door fell onto the floor and the Doctor was pulling his granddaughter out, fretting. Ian looked confused as Susan coughed and sputtered and hugged her grandfather. Barbara just stood there, blinking stupidly as they carried her to her room, to help her to bed.

So much had happened. So much that she didn't understand.

She felt the weariness fall about her like a thick blanket, one stuffed with relief and edged nicely with exhaustion. It felt good. She was home. They were all alive. She could deal with exhaustion. She could burrow deep inside of it and wrap it around her, could embrace it. She knew what to do about exhaustion.

She staggered through the doors of the Ship, hoping desperately that somewhere, somewhere inside, there'd still be a working bath.

XXX

"He doesn't understand, that's all." The voice was Barbara's. She and the Doctor were staring at the scanner. Staring at the peculiar sight: the Earth as seen from space, with multi-colored rings draped elegantly around it lit in purple and amber hues.

"What does Chesteron expect me to do, hmmm?" The Doctor's voice was gruff, irritated. "Go outside and glue all the pieces together? The Moon is gone, my dear. There's nothing I can do." His voice, its helplessness and its disbelief, trailed out through the door to where Susan was eavesdropping.

"But how can it? I mean, the explosion, London… all of it? What about the tides? How can it happen? What about history? My history?"

"Your history? What makes you think it belongs to you? It will adjust, or it won't. I don't know how you expect me to answer your questions. Everything's changed… but everything always changes… as must we…"

Their futile bickering continued, following Susan as she slipped away through the corridors, in drips and barks of syllables, but she wasn't listening. She'd heard Ian coming towards the console room and she wasn't ready to face him, not just yet. She'd seen the looks he'd been giving her, and she wasn't ready for his questions. Wasn't sure how to answer them.

She was not the Susan that he'd feared, this was true at least. That Susan, that Putya had died with Susan's body. Susan had held onto the edge of death for as long as she'd dared before she regenerated, desperately hoping she'd fooled the cybermat, that Putya was really gone.

But in doing so, she'd become a murderer. Something she didn't want to face, didn't want Ian to face. Not until she'd had some time to come to terms with herself, or with this new body that she'd carefully matched to her own.

She was still dizzy with the energy of it, with the rush that comes with rebirth.

She needed time.

And more worrying, more worrying than an Earth with rings, with a new history stretching before it… more worrying than all of that was when she'd gone back to check the capsule, gone to look back inside the metal shell: there was no sign of the cybermat.

It was loose inside the Ship. Somewhere, in an infinite number of corridors, it was lurking.

She stepped quietly through the corridors, hunting, bracing to fight.

To kill.


End file.
